ew ones--but Poppas
survived them all. Cressida was not musically intelligent; she never
became so. Who does not remember the countless rehearsals which were
necessary before she first sang _Isolde_ in Berlin; the disgust of the
conductor, the sullenness of the tenor, the rages of the blonde
_teufelin_, boiling with the impatience of youth and genius, who sang her
_Brangaena_? Everything but her driving power Cressida had to get from
the outside.

Poppas was, in his way, quite as incomplete as his pupil. He possessed a
great many valuable things for which there is no market; intuitions,
discrimination, imagination, a whole twilight world of intentions and
shadowy beginnings which were dark to Cressida. I remember that when
"Trilby" was published she fell into a fright and said such books ought
to be prohibited by law; which gave me an intimation of what their
relationship had actually become.

Poppas was indispensable to her. He was like a book in which she had
written down more about herself than she could possibly remember--and
it was information that she might need at any moment. He was the one
person who knew her absolutely and who saw into the bottom of her grief.
An artist's saddest secrets are those that have to do with his artistry.
Poppas knew all the simple things that were so desperately hard for
Cressida, all the difficult things in which she could count on herself;
her stupidities and inconsistencies, the chiaroscuro of the voice itself
and what could be expected from the mind somewhat mismated with it. He
knew where she was sound and where she was mended. With him she could
share the depressing knowledge of what a wretchedly faulty thing any
productive faculty is.

But if Poppas was necessary to her career, she was his career. By the
time Cressida left the Metropolitan Opera Company, Poppas was a rich
man. He had always received a retaining fee and a percentage of her
salary,--and he was a man of simple habits. Her liberality with Poppas
was one of the weapons that Horace and the Garnets used against Cressida,
and it was a point in the argument by which they justified to themselves
their rapacity. Whatever they didn't get, they told themselves, Poppas
would. What they got, therefore, they were only saving from Poppas. The
Greek ached a good deal at the general pillage, and Cressida's
conciliatory methods with her family made him sarcastic and spiteful. But
he had to make terms, somehow, with the Garnets