aracter of Isolde. Again sleep thickened, and she found it impossible
to follow her idea. It eluded her; she could not grasp it. It turned to
a dream, a dream which she could not understand even while she dreamed
it. But as she awaked, she uttered a cry. It happened to be the note she
had to sing when the curtain goes up and Isolde lies on the couch
yearning for Tristan, for assuagement of the fever which consumes her.
All other actresses had striven to portray an Irish princess, or what
they believed an Irish princess might be. But she cared nothing for the
Irish princess, and a great deal for the physical and mental distress of
a woman sick with love.

Her power of recalling her sensations was so intense, that in her warm
bed she lived again the long, aching evenings of the long winter in
Dulwich, before she went away with Owen. She saw again the Spring
twilight in the scrap of black garden, where she used to stand watching
the stars. She remembered the dread craving to worship them, the anguish
of remorse and fear on her bed, her visions of distant countries and the
gleam of eyes which looked at her through the dead of night. How
miserable she had been in that time--in those months. She had wanted to
sing, and she could not, and she had wanted--she had not known what was
the matter with her. That feeling (how well she remembered it!) as if
she wanted to go mad! And all those lightnesses of the brain she could
introduce in the opening scene--the very opening cry was one of them.
And with these two themes she thought she could create an Isolde more
intense than the Isolde of the fat women whom she had seen walking about
the stage, lifting their arms and trying to look like sculpture.

No one whom she had seen had attempted to differentiate between Isolde
before she drinks and after she has drunk the love potion, and, to avoid
this mistake, she felt that she would only have to be true to herself.
After the love potion had been drunk, the moment of her life to put on
the stage was its moment of highest sexual exaltation. Which was that?
There were so many, she smiled in her doze. Perhaps the most wonderful
day of her life was the day Madame Savelli had said, "If you'll stay
with me for a year, I'll make something wonderful of you." She recalled
the drive in the Bois, and she saw again the greensward, the poplars,
and the stream of carriages. She had hardly been able so resist
springing up in the carriage and singing to t