constructed of a yard or two of green velvet--a
reviling, shrieking green which would have made a fright of any woman
who had not inextinguishable beauty--and it was made without armholes, a
device to which we were then so unaccustomed that it was nothing less
than alarming. The velvet skirt split back from a transparent gold-lace
petticoat, gold stockings, gold slippers. The narrow train was,
apparently, looped to both ankles, and it kept curling about her feet
like a serpent's tail, turning up its gold lining as if it were squirming
over on its back. It was not, we felt, a costume in which to sing Mozart
and Handel and Beethoven.

Kitty sensed the chill in the air, and it amused her. She liked to be
thought a brilliant artist by other artists, but by the world at large
she liked to be thought a daring creature. She had every reason to
believe, from experience and from example, that to shock the great crowd
was the surest way to get its money and to make her name a household
word. Nobody ever became a household word of being an artist, surely; and
you were not a thoroughly paying proposition until your name meant
something on the sidewalk and in the barber-shop. Kitty studied her
audience with an appraising eye. She liked the stimulus of this
disapprobation. As she faced this hard-shelled public she felt keen and
interested; she knew that she would give such a recital as cannot often
be heard for money. She nodded gaily to the young man at the piano, fell
into an attitude of seriousness, and began the group of Beethoven and
Mozart songs.

Though McKann would not have admitted it, there were really a great many
people in the concert-hall who knew what the prodigal daughter of their
country was singing, and how well she was doing it. They thawed gradually
under the beauty of her voice and the subtlety of her interpretation.
She had sung seldom in concert then, and they had supposed her very
dependent upon the accessories of the opera. Clean singing, finished
artistry, were not what they expected from her. They began to feel, even,
the wayward charm of her personality.

McKann, who stared coldly up at the balconies during her first song,
during the second glanced cautiously at the green apparition before him.
He was vexed with her for having retained a debutante figure. He
comfortably classed all singers--especially operatic singers--as "fat
Dutchwomen" or "shifty Sadies," and Kitty would not fit into his clever
gener