then at Margaret. She was blushing. "What I meant," said Dennett,
quickly turning the stream his way, "What I meant was that Miss
Fridolina knows the score, and being temperamentally suited to the
role--" "Temperamentally," sneered Arthmann. "Yes, that's what I said,"
snapped the other man, who had become surprisingly pugnacious--Fridolina
was pressing his foot with heavy approval--"temperamentally." "You know
Caspar"--the brows of the mother and sculptor were thunderous--"you know
that Mr. Arthmann is a very clever sculptor, and is a great reader of
faces and character. Now he says, that I have no dramatic talent, no
temperament, and ought to--" "Get married," boomed in Arthmann with his
most Norwegian accent. The bomb exploded. "I'd rather see her"--"in her
grave, Mrs. Fridolin"--"Oh, you wicked, sarcastic Louie Bredd. No, not
in her grave, but even as Isolde. Yes, I admit that I am converted to
Wagnerism. Wagner's music is better for some singers than marriage.
Prima donnas have no business to be married. If their husbands are not
wholly worthless--and there are few exceptions--they are apt to be
ninnies and spongers on their wives' salaries." Then she related the
story of Wilski, who was a Miss Willies from Rochester. She married a
novelist, a young man with the brightest possible prospects imaginable.
What happened? He never wrote a story after his marriage in which he
didn't make his wife the heroine, so much so that all the magazine
editors and publishers refused his stuff, sending it back with the
polite comment, Too much Wilski!

"That's nothing," interrupted Louie. "She ought to have been happy with
such a worshipping husband. I know of a great singer, the greatest
singer alive--Frutto"--they all groaned--"the _greatest_, I say. Well,
she married a lazy French count. Not once, but a hundred times she has
returned home after a concert only to find her husband playing cards
with her maid. She raised a row, but what was the use? She told me that
she'd rather have him at home with the servant playing poker than at the
opera where he was once seen to bet on the cards turned up by Calve in
the third act of 'Carmen.' I've written the thing for my paper and I
mean to turn it into a short story some day." Every one had tales to
relate of the meanness, rapacity, dissipation and extravagance of the
prima donna's husband from Adelina Patti to Mitwindt, the German singer
who regularly committed her husband to jail at the be