om her everyday self
now. But it was not easy. Margaret was there, no doubt, behind the
paint and the 'liquid white,' but the reality was what the public
saw beyond the footlights two or three times a week during the opera
season, and applauded with might and main as the most successful lyric
soprano of the day.

There were moments when she tried to get hold of herself and bring
herself back. They came most often after some great emotion in the
theatre, when the sight of the painted mask in the glass shocked and
disgusted her as it did to-night; when the contrasts of life were
almost more than she could bear, when her sensibilities awoke again,
when the fastidiousness of the delicately nurtured girl revolted under
the rough familiarity of such a comrade as Stromboli, and rebelled
against the sordid cynicism of Schreiermeyer.

She shuddered at the mere idea that the manager should have thought
she would drink out of the glass he had just used. Even the Italian
peasant, who had been a goatherd in Calabria, and could hardly write
his name, showed more delicacy, according to his lights, which were
certainly not dazzling. A faint ray of Roman civilisation had reached
him through generations of slaves and serfs and shepherds. But no
such traditions of forgotten delicacy disturbed the manners of
Schreiermeyer. The glass from which he had drunk was good enough for
any primadonna in his company, and it was silly for any of them to
give themselves airs. Were they not largely his creatures, fed from
his hand, to work for him while they were young, and to be turned out
as soon as they began to sing false? He was by no means the worst of
his kind, as Margaret knew very well.

She thought of her childhood, of her mother and of her father, both
dead long before she had gone on the stage; and of that excellent and
kind Mrs. Rushmore, her American mother's American friend, who had
taken her as her own daughter, and had loved her and cared for her,
and had shed tears when Margaret insisted on becoming a singer; who
had fought for her, too, and had recovered for her a small fortune of
which her mother had been cheated. For Margaret would have been more
than well off without her profession, even when she had made her
_debut_, and she had given up much to be a singer, believing that she
knew what she was doing.

But now she was ready to undo it all and to go back; at least she
thought she was, as she stared at herself in the glass whil