o "interpret the thought of the great master" or to "advance the
singing art yet higher" or even to win fame and applause. She had one
object--to earn her living on the grand opera stage, and to earn it as
a prima donna because that meant the best living. She frankly told
Cyrilla that this was her object, when Cyrilla forced her one day to
talk about her aims. Cyrilla looked pained, broke a melancholy silence
to say:

"I know you don't mean that. You are too intelligent. You sing too
well."

"Yes, I mean just that," said Mildred. "A living."

"At any rate, don't say it. You give such a false impression."

"To whom? Not to Crossley, and not to Moldini, and why should I care
what any others think? They are not paying my expenses. And
regardless of what they think now, they'll be at my feet if I succeed,
and they'll put me under theirs if I don't."

"How hard you have grown," cried Cyrilla.

"How sensible, you mean. I've merely stopped being a self-deceiver and
a sentimentalist."

"Believe me, my dear, you are sacrificing your character to your
ambition."

"I never had any real character until ambition came," replied Mildred.
"The soft, vacillating, sweet and weak thing I used to have wasn't
character."

"But, dear, you can't think it superior character to center one's whole
life about a sordid ambition."

"Sordid?"

"Merely to make a living."

Mildred laughed merrily and mockingly. "You call that sordid? Then
for heaven's sake what is high? You had left you money enough to live
on, if you have to. No one left me an income. So, I'm fighting for
independence--and that means for self-respect. Is self-respect sordid,
Cyrilla!"

And then Cyrilla understood--in part, not altogether. She lived in the
ordinary environment of flap-doodle and sweet hypocrisy and
sentimentality; and none such can more than vaguely glimpse the
realities.

Toward the end of the summer Moldini said:

"It's over. You have won."

Mildred looked at him in puzzled surprise.

"You have learned it all. You will succeed. The rest is detail."

"But I've learned nothing as yet," protested she.

"You have learned to teach yourself," replied the Italian. "You at
last can hear yourself sing, and you know when you sing right and when
you sing wrong, and you know how to sing right. The rest is easy. Ah,
my dear Miss Gower, you will work NOW!"

Mildred did not understand. She was even daunted by that "You will
work N