which many young writers are subject when cutting their
literary milk-teeth, and from which musical critics are never quite
immune. Margaret could no longer help reading what was written about
her; that was one of the signs of the change that had come over her,
and she disliked it, and sometimes despised herself for it, though
she was quite unable to resist the impulse. The appetite for flattery
which comes of living on it may be innocent, but it is never harmless.
Dante consigned the flatterers to Inferno, and more particularly to a
very nasty place there: it is true that there were no musical critics
in his day; but he does not say much about the flattered, perhaps
because they suffer enough when they find out the truth, or lose the
gift for which they have been over-praised.

The Primadonna was in a detestably uncomfortable state of mind on the
day after the performance of the revived opera. Her dual nature was
hopelessly mixed; Cordova was in a rage with Stromboli, Schreiermeyer,
Baci-Roventi, and the whole company, not to mention Signor Bambinelli
the conductor, the whole orchestra, and the dead composer of the
_Elisir d'Amore_; but Margaret Donne was ashamed of herself for
caring, and for being spoilt, and for bearing poor Lushington a grudge
because he had foretold a result that was only to be expected with
such a tenor as Stromboli; she despised herself for wickedly wishing
that the latter had cracked on the final high note and had made
himself ridiculous. But he had not cracked at all; in imagination she
could hear the note still, tremendous, round, and persistently drawn
out, as if it came out of a tenor trombone and had all the world's
lungs behind it.

In her mortification Cordova was ready to give up lyric opera and
study Wagner, in order to annihilate Pompeo Stromboli, who did not
even venture _Lohengrin_. Schreiermeyer had unkindly told him that if
he arrayed his figure in polished armour he would look like a silver
teapot; and Stromboli was very sensitive to ridicule. Even if he had
possessed a dramatic voice, he could never have bounded about the
stage in pink tights and the exiguous skin of an unknown wild animal
as Siegfried, and in the flower scene of _Parsifal_ he would have
looked like Falstaff in _The Merry Wives of Windsor_. But Cordova
could have made herself into a stately Brunhilde, a wild and lovely
Kundry, or a fair and fateful Isolde, with the very least amount of
artificial aid that the