Margaret was applauded, but as a matter of course.  There was no electric thrill in the clapping of hands; she got the formal applause which is regularly given to the sovereign, but not the enthusiasm which is bestowed spontaneously on the conqueror.  When she buttered her face and got the paint off, she was a little pale, and her eyes were not kind.  It was the first time that she had not carried everything before her since she had begun her astonishing career, and in her first disappointment she had not philosophy enough to console herself with the consideration that it would have been infinitely worse to be thrown into the shade by another lyric soprano, instead of by the most popular lyric tenor on the stage.  She was also uncomfortably aware that Lushington had predicted what had happened, and she was informed that he had not even taken the trouble to come to the first performance of the opera.  Logotheti, who knew everything about his old rival, had told her that Lushington was in Paris that week, and was going on to see his mother in Provence.

The Primadonna was put out with herself and with everybody, after the manner of great artists when a performance has not gone exactly as they had hoped.  The critics said the next morning that the Senorita da Cordova had been in good voice and had sung with excellent taste and judgment, but that was all:  as if any decent soprano might not do as well!  They wrote as if she might have been expected to show neither judgment nor taste, and as if she were threatened with a cold.  Then they went on to praise Pompeo Stromboli with the very words they usually applied to her.  His voice was full, rich, tender, vibrating, flexible, soft, powerful, stirring, natural, cultivated, superb, phenomenal, and perfectly fresh.  The critics had a severe attack of ‘adjectivitis.’

Paul Griggs had first applied the name to that inflammation of language to which many young writers are subject when cutting their literary milk-teeth, and from which musical critics are never quite immune.  Margaret could no longer help reading what was written about her; that was one of the signs of the change that had come over her, and she disliked it, and sometimes despised herself for it, though she was quite unable to resist the impulse.  The appetite for flattery which comes of living on it may be innocent, but it is never harmless.  Dante consigned the flatterers to Inferno, and more particularly to a very nasty place there:  it is true that there were no musical critics in his day; but he does not say much about the flattered, perhaps because they suffer enough when they find out the truth, or lose the gift for which they have been over-praised.