ng to
them for the first time. I admit that there are a few places where she
is distinctly violent. The curse must be given violently, but I think it
is possible to make it felt that her violence is a sexual violence, a
sort of wish to go mad. I can't explain. Can't you understand?"

"Yes, I think I do; you want to sing the first part of the act
languidly. There is more in the music which supports your reading than I
thought. In the passage where Isolde says to Brangaene, but really to
herself, 'To die without having been loved by that man!' the love motive
appears here for the first time, but more drawn out, broader than
elsewhere."

She declared that Wagner had emphasised his meaning in this passage as
if he had anticipated all the misreadings of this first act, and was
striving to guard himself against them. She grew excited in the
discussion. She had merely followed her instinct, but she was glad that
Ulick had challenged her reading, for as they examined the music clause
by clause, they found still further warrant for her conception.

"Ah, the old man knew what he was doing," she said; "he had marked this
passage to be sung gloomily, and by gloomily he meant infinite
lassitude." But this intention had not been grasped, and the singers had
either sung it without any particular expression, or with a stupid stage
expression which meant if possible something less than nothing. "Then,
you see, if I sing the first half of the first act as wearily as the
music allows me, I shall get a contrast--an Isolde who has not drunk the
love potion. The love potion is of course only a symbol of her surrender
to her desire."

Ulick would have liked to have gone through the whole of the music of
the act with her. It was only in this way that he could get an idea of
how her reading would work out. But in that moment each read in the
other's eyes an avowal of which they were immediately ashamed, and which
they tried to dissimulate.

"I am tired. We won't have any more music this evening."

His thoughts seemed to pass suddenly from her, and then, without her
being aware how it began, she found herself listening intently to him.
He was talking in that strange, rhythmical chant of his about the primal
melancholy of man, and his remote past always insurgent in him. Although
she did not quite understand, perhaps because she did not quite
understand, she was carried away far out of all reason, and it seemed to
her that she could listen