out hunting, and there was a question
whether I should be able to get there in time. Imagine my annoyance
on being told I must not speak to her."

"Who told you that?"

"Madame Savelli."

"Oh, I understand I You arrived the very day of her first
appearance?"

Owen threw up his head and began reading the notices.

"They are all the same," he said, after reading half a dozen, and
Ulick felt relieved. "But stay, this one is different," and the long
slip dismayed Ulick, who could not feel much interest in the
impression that Evelyn had created as Elsa--he did not know how many
years ago.

"'Miss Innes is a tall, graceful woman, who crosses the stage with
slow, harmonious movements--any slight quickening of her step
awakening a sense of foreboding in the spectator. Her eyes, too, are
of great avail, and the moment she comes on the stage one is
attracted by their strangeness--grave, mysterious, earnest eyes,
which smile rarely; but when they do smile happiness seems to mount
up from within, illuminating her life from end to end. She will never
be unhappy again, one thinks. It is with her smile she recompenses
her champion knight when he lays low Telramund, and it is with her
smile she wins his love--and ours. We regret, for her sake, there
are so few smiles in Wagner: very few indeed--not one in 'Senta' nor
in 'Elizabeth.'" The newspaper cutting slipped from Owen's hand, and
he talked for a long time about her walk and her smile, and then
about her "Iphigenia," which he declared to be one of the most
beautiful performances ever seen, her personality lending itself to
the incarnation of this Greek idea of fate and self-sacrifice. But
Gluck's music was, in Owen's opinion, old-fashioned even at the time
it was written--containing beautiful things, of course, but somewhat
stiff in the joints, lacking the clear insight and direct expression
of Beethoven's. "One man used to write about her very well, and
seemed to understand her better than any other. And writing about
this performance he says--Now, if I could find you his article." The
search proved a long one, but as it was about to be abandoned Owen
turned up the cutting he was in search of.

"'Her nature intended her for the representation of ideal heroines
whose love is pure, and it does not allow her to depict the violence
of physical passion and the delirium of the senses. She is an artist
of the peaks, whose feet may not descend into the plain and follow
its igno