ir, nor the blue of his dazzling
eyes. The first impression was that he was too beautiful for a man, that
he had a woman's beauty, that he had the waxen beauty of a doll; but the
firm, decisive lines of the mouth and chin, the overhanging brows, and
the luxuriance of his amber moustache, spoke more sternly. Gradually one
perceived that beneath the girlish mask, beneath the contours and the
complexion incomparably delicate, there was an individuality intensely
and provocatively male. His body was rather less than tall, and it was
muscular and springy. He walked on to the platform as an unspoilt man
should walk, and he bowed to the applause as if bowing chivalrously to a
woman whom he respected but did not love. Diaz was twenty-six that year;
he had recently returned from a tour round the world; he was filled full
of triumph, renown, and adoration. As I have said, he was already
legendary. He had become so great and so marvellous that those who had
never seen him were in danger of forgetting that he was a living human
being, obliged to eat and drink, and practise scales, and visit his
tailor's. Thus it had happened to me. During the first moments I found
myself thinking, 'This cannot be Diaz. It is not true that at last I see
him. There must be some mistake.' Then he sat down leisurely to the
piano; his gaze ranged across the hall, and I fancied that, for a second,
it met mine. My two seats were in the first row of the stalls, and I
could see every slightest change of his face. So that at length I felt
that Diaz was real, and that he was really there close in front of me, a
seraph and yet very human. He was all alone on the great platform, and
the ebonized piano seemed enormous and formidable before him. And all
around was the careless public--ignorant, unsympathetic, exigent,
impatient, even inimical--two thousand persons who would get value for
their money or know the reason why. The electric light and the inclement
gaze of society rained down cruelly upon that defenceless head. I wanted
to protect it. The tears rose to my eyes, and I stretched out towards
Diaz the hands of my soul. My passionate sympathy must have reached him
like a beneficent influence, of which, despite the perfect
self-possession and self-confidence of his demeanour, it seemed to me
that he had need.

I had risked much that night. I had committed an enormity. No one but a
grown woman who still vividly remembers her girlhood can appreciate my
feeling