"Then I'll have to suffer for it. I must do what seems best to me."

"But I'm sure you're wrong. I never knew anyone to act as you're
acting. Everyone rests and freshens up."

Mildred lost patience, almost lost her temper. "You're trying to tempt
me to ruin myself," she said. "Please stop it. You say you never knew
anyone to do as I'm doing. Very well. But how many girls have you
known who have succeeded?"

Cyrilla hesitatingly confessed that she had known none.

"Yet you've known scores who've tried."

"But they didn't fail because they didn't work enough. Many of them
worked too much."

Mildred laughed. "How do you know why they failed?" said she. "You
haven't thought about it as I have. You haven't LIVED it. Cyrilla, I
served my apprenticeship at listening to nonsense about careers. I want
to have nothing to do with inspiration, and artistic temperament, and
spontaneous genius, and all the rest of the lies. Moldini and I know
what we are about. So I'm living as those who have succeeded lived and
not as those who have failed."

Cyrilla was silenced, but not convinced. The amazing improvement in
Mildred's health, the splendid slim strength and suppleness of her
body, the new and stable glories of her voice--all these she knew
about, but they did not convince her. She believed in work, in hard
work, but to her work meant the music itself. She felt that the Rivi
system and the dirty, obscure little Moldini between them were
destroying Mildred by destroying all "temperament" in her.

It was the old, old criticism of talent upon genius. Genius has always
won in its own time and generation all the world except talent. To
talent contemporaneous genius, genius seen at its patient, plodding
toil, seems coarse and obvious and lacking altogether in inspiration.
Talent cannot comprehend that creation is necessarily in travail and in
all manner of unloveliness.

Mildred toiled on like a slave under the lash, and Moldini and the Rivi
system were her twin relentless drivers. She learned to rule herself
with an iron hand. She discovered the full measure of her own
deficiencies, and she determined to make herself a competent lyric
soprano, perhaps something of a dramatic soprano. She dismissed from
her mind all the "high" thoughts, all the dreams wherewith the little
people, even the little people who achieve a certain success, beguile
the tedium of their journey along the hard road. She was not working
t