ng present to hear his work. For
three days they besieged Ivan with expostulation, incredulity,
persuasion. All in vain. When, twenty minutes after the hour on the
night named, the curtain rose, disclosing to the chorus a house packed
to the doors, the composer's box--reserved for him--contained only the
two Rubinsteins, Balakirev, Kashkine, and Laroche. Ostrovsky, the
librettist, was behind the scenes, still on his knees before the
Menschikov, in a mad endeavor to obtain her promise to abstain from the
French habit of adding an _e_ to the end of every word.

Ivan, deserted even by Sosha, who had a seat in the topmost gallery of
the opera-house, sat before his dying fire, enduring the last throes of
that long struggle for recognition which, he believed in the depths of
his soul, was finally to end, to-night. It is seldom, indeed, that there
does not linger, however unwelcomed, one little shred of hope for the
success of one's own work. But with Ivan there now remained not even
this. The struggle of the past weeks, the glaring imperfections that had
crowded yesterday's dress rehearsal, had brought him despair
unutterable. Up to yesterday afternoon, all had been hopelessly wrong.
And the last thing he had heard, on the previous day, as he fled the
theatre, had been the loud echoes of the latest quarrel between Mesdames
Menschikov and Castello, in which the former sat alternately reviling
her companion and wailing that her voice, on the morrow, would be a mere
hoarse shred. This Ivan did not doubt:--and the first important solo of
the first act, whereby he had planned to capture and hold the interest
of the audience, depended wholly upon her!--Moreover, Finocchi's
costumes, finished barely in time for the dress-rehearsal, had been
discovered to be hopeless anachronisms, which the ridiculous little man
had violently refused to have altered in the least.--And the result of
Merelli's last, special appeal, Ivan had not cared to learn.

These incidents, and many earlier ones of his long season of trial,
whirled in a numbing chaos through Ivan's tired brain, wreathing
themselves in malevolent phantasies about the undimmed picture of his
bald failure at the concert, in the presence of his father. Indeed,
unsuspected though it remained by any of his friends, it was really this
fact of Prince Michael's witness of his misfortune--his second
disgrace--which, through all these months, had been eating, like some
poisonous acid, into t