journeys to Cornwall and Brittany; and one day when Owen
called he heard that she had gone to Ireland, and was expected back
to-morrow evening. She read Isolde into the morning paper, receiving
hints from the cases that came up before the magistrates. She found
Isolde in every book, all that happened seemed extraordinarily
fortuitous, the light of her idea revealing significance in the most
ordinary things. Her life was ransacked like an old work-box, all kinds
of stages of mentality, opinions, beliefs, prejudices, trite and
conventional enough, came up and were thrown aside. But now and then the
memory of an emotion, of a feeling, would prove to be just what she
wanted to add a moment's life to her Isolde; the memory of a gesture, of
a look was sufficient, and she sank back in her chair, her eyes dilated
and moody, thinking how she could work this truth to herself into the
harmony of the picture she was elaborating.

Evelyn had seen Rosa Sucher play the part, and had admired her rendering
as far as we can admire that which is not only antagonistic, but even
discordant to our own natures. She admitted it to be very sweeping,
triumphant and loud, a fine braying of trumpets from the rise to the
fall of the curtain. Rosa Sucher had no doubt attained an extraordinary
oneness of idea, but at what price? Her Isolde was a hurricane, a sort
of avalanche; and the woman was lost in the storm. She had missed the
magic of the woman who, personal to our flesh and dream, breaks upon our
life like the Spring; and this was just what Evelyn wanted to out on the
stage. There was plenty of breadth, but it was breadth at the price of
accent. There was a great frame and a sort of design within the frame,
but in Evelyn's sense the picture was wanting. There was an
extraordinary and incomprehensible neglect of that personal accent
without which there is no life. And the difference between the Isolde
who has not drunk, and the Isolde who has drunk the love potion which
she, Evelyn, was so intent upon indicating, had never occurred to Rosa
Sucher, or if it had, it had been swept aside as a negligible detail.
After all, Isolde has to be a woman a man could be in love with, and
that is not the impact and the shriek of a gale from the south-west. No
doubt Rosa Sucher's idea of the part was Wagner's idea at one moment of
his life. Wagner was a man with hundreds of ideas; he tried them all,
retaining some and discarding others. Some half-dozen have