s like a wire, stringing them together like
beads. Yes, it was she, the whilom _dugazon_ of the opera troupe.
Not that she ever was a _dugazon_, but that was what her voice once
aspired to be: a _dugazon manquee_ would better describe her.

What a ghost! But they always appeared like mere evaporations of
real women. For what woman of flesh and blood can seriously maintain
through life the role of sham attendant on sham sensations, and play
public celebrant of other women's loves and lovers, singing, or rather
saying, nothing more enlivening than: "Oh, madame!" and "Ah, madame!"
and "_Quelle ivresse!_" or "_Quelle horreur!_" or, in recitative,
detailing whatever dreary platitudes and inanities the librettist and
Heaven connive to put upon the tongues of confidantes and attendants?

[Illustration: "TO POSE IN ABJECT PATIENCE AND AWKWARDNESS."]

Looking at her--how it came over one! The music, the lights, the
scene; the fat soprano confiding to her the fact of the "amour
extreme" she bears for the tenor, to which she, the _dugazon_, does
not even try to listen; her eyes wandering listlessly over the
audience. The calorous secret out, and in her possession, how she
stumbles over her train to the back of the stage, there to pose in
abject patience and awkwardness, while the gallant baritone, touching
his sword, and flinging his cape over his shoulder, defies the world
and the tenor, who is just recovering from his "ut de poitrine" behind
the scenes.

She was talking to me all the time, apologizing for the intrusion,
explaining her mission, which involved a short story of her life, as
women's intrusions and missions usually do. But my thoughts, also as
usual, distracted me from listening, as so often they have distracted
me from following what was perhaps more profitable.

The composer, of course, wastes no music upon her; flinging to her
only an occasional recitative in two notes, but always ending in a
reef of a scale, trill, or roulade, for her to wreck her voice on
before the audience. The _chef d'orchestre_, if he is charitable,
starts her off with a contribution from his own lusty lungs, and then
she--oh, her voice is always thinner and more osseous than her arms,
and her smile no more graceful than her train!

As well think of the simulated trees, water-falls, and chateaux
leaving the stage, as the _dugazon_! One always imagines them singing
on into dimness, dustiness, unsteadiness, and uselessness, until, like