ciplined and
so corrupted by conventional life as is yours. The basis of a singing
career is health and strength. You must have great physical strength
to be able to sing operas. You must have perfect health.

Diet and exercise. A routine life, its routine rigidly adhered to, day
in and day out, month after month, year after year. Small and
uninteresting and monotonous food, nothing to drink, and, of course, no
cigarettes. Such is the secret of a reliable voice for you who have a
"delicate throat"--which is the silly, shallow, and misleading way of
saying a delicate digestion, for sore throat always means indigestion,
never means anything else. To sing, the instrument, the absolutely
material machine, must be in perfect order. The rest is easy.

Some singers can commit indiscretions of diet and of lack of exercise.
But not you, because you lack this natural strength. Do not be
deceived and misled by their example.

Exercise. You must make your body strong, powerful. You have not the
muscles by nature. You must acquire them.

The following routine of diet and exercise made one of the great
singers, and kept her great for a quarter of a century. If you adopt
it, without variation, you can make a career. If you do not, you need
not hope for anything but failure and humiliation. Within my knowledge
sixty-eight young men and young women have started in on this system.
Not one had the character to persist to success. This may suggest why,
except two who are at the very top, all of the great singers are men
and women whom nature has made powerful of body and of digestion--so
powerful that their indiscretions only occasionally make them
unreliable.

There Mildred stopped and flung the paper aside. She did not care even
to glance at the exercises prescribed or at the diet and the routine of
daily work. How dull and uninspired! How grossly material! Stomach!
Chewing! Exercising machines! Plodding dreary miles daily, rain or
shine! What could such things have to do with the free and glorious
career of an inspired singer? Keith was laughing at her as he hastened
away, abandoning her to her fate.

She examined herself in the glass to make sure that the ravages of her
attack of rage and grief and despair could be effaced within a few
hours, then she wrote a note--formal yet friendly--to Stanley Baird,
informing him that she would receive him that evening. He came while
Cyrilla and Mildred were having their