often reckless; but with the growth of her daughter came reflection....
Hilda was not to be treated as other girls. Her Scotch ancestry showed
itself early. The girl did not, and could not, see the curious life
about her; it was simply a myopia that her mother fostered. Thus,
through all the welter and confusion of an opera-singer's life, Hilda
walked serenely. She knew there were disagreeable things in the world
but refused herself even the thought of them. It was not the barrier of
innocence but rather a selection of certain aspects of life that she
fancied, and an absolute impassibility in the presence of evil. Then her
mother grew more careful.

Hilda loved Wagner. She knew every work of the Master from "Die Feen" to
"Parsifal." She studied music, arduously playing accompaniments for her
mother. In this way she learned the skeleton of the mighty music dramas,
and grew up absorbing the torrid music as though it were Mozartean. She
repeated the stories of the dramas as a child its astronomy lessons,
without feeling. She saw Siegmund and Sieglinde entwined in that
wondrous Song of Spring, and would have laughed in your face if you
hinted that all this was anything but many-colored arabesque. It was her
daily bread and butter, and like one of those pudic creatures of the
Eleusinian mysteries she lived in the very tropics of passion, yet
without one pulse-throb of its feverishness. It was the ritual of Wagner
she worshipped; the nerves of his score had never been laid bare to her.
She took her mother's tumult in good faith, and ridiculed singers of
more frigid temperaments. When she writhed in Tristan's arms this vestal
sat in front, a piano score on her lap, carefully listening, and later,
at home, she would say:

"Dearest, you skipped two bars in the scene with Brangaene," and the
singer could not contradict the stern young critic....

Herr Albert sang with them longer than most tenors. They met him in
Bayreuth and then in Munich. When they went to Berlin Albert was with
them, and also in London. Her mother said that his style and acting
suited her better than any artist with whom she had ever sung. He was a
young man, much younger than Madame Stock, and a Hungarian. Tall and
very dark, he looked unlike the ideal Wagner tenor. Hilda teased him and
called him the hero of a melodrama. She grew fond of the young man, who
was always doing her some favor. To her mother he was extremely polite;
indeed he treated her as a q