ght
when he sang, candidly putting herself among a thousand others.

D'Esquerre's arrival in the early winter was the signal for a feminine
hegira toward New York. On the nights when he sang women flocked to
the Metropolitan from mansions and hotels, from typewriter desks,
schoolrooms, shops, and fitting rooms. They were of all conditions
and complexions. Women of the world who accepted him knowingly as they
sometimes took champagne for its agreeable effect; sisters of charity
and overworked shopgirls, who received him devoutly; withered women who
had taken doctorate degrees and who worshipped furtively through prism
spectacles; business women and women of affairs, the Amazons who dwelt
afar from men in the stony fastnesses of apartment houses. They all
entered into the same romance; dreamed, in terms as various as the hues
of fantasy, the same dream; drew the same quick breath when he stepped
upon the stage, and, at his exit, felt the same dull pain of shouldering
the pack again.

There were the maimed, even; those who came on crutches, who were pitted
by smallpox or grotesquely painted by cruel birth stains. These, too,
entered with him into enchantment. Stout matrons became slender girls
again; worn spinsters felt their cheeks flush with the tenderness of
their lost youth. Young and old, however hideous, however fair, they
yielded up their heat--whether quick or latent--sat hungering for the
mystic bread wherewith he fed them at this eucharist of sentiment.

Sometimes, when the house was crowded from the orchestra to the last row
of the gallery, when the air was charged with this ecstasy of fancy,
he himself was the victim of the burning reflection of his power. They
acted upon him in turn; he felt their fervent and despairing appeal to
him; it stirred him as the spring drives the sap up into an old tree;
he, too, burst into bloom. For the moment he, too, believed again,
desired again, he knew not what, but something.

But it was not in these exalted moments that Caroline had learned to
fear him most. It was in the quiet, tired reserve, the dullness, even,
that kept him company between these outbursts that she found that
exhausting drain upon her sympathies which was the very pith
and substance of their alliance. It was the tacit admission of
disappointment under all this glamour of success--the helplessness of
the enchanter to at all enchant himself--that awoke in her an illogical,
womanish desire to in some way