Besides, these good people really liked her.  The only members of the profession who hated her were the other lyric sopranos.  Schreiermeyer, rapacious and glittering, had a photograph of her hideously enamelled in colours inside the cover of his watch, and the facsimile of her autograph was engraved across the lid of his silver cigarette-case.  Pompeo Stromboli carried some of her hair in a locket which he wore on his chain between two amulets against the Evil Eye.  Fraeulein Ottilie treasured a little water-colour sketch of her as Juliet on which Margaret had written a few friendly words, and the Baci-Roventi actually went to the length of asking her advice about the high notes the contralto has to sing in such operas as Semiramide.  It would be hard to imagine a more sincere proof of affection and admiration than this.

Margaret knew that the greeting was genuine and that she ought to be pleased, but at the first moment the noise and the kissing and the rough promiscuity of it all disgusted her.

Then she saw that all had brought her little presents, which were arranged side by side on the piano, and she suddenly remembered that it was her birthday.  They were small things without value, intended to make her laugh.  Stromboli had sent to Italy for a Neapolitan clay figure of a shepherd, cleverly modelled and painted, and vaguely resembling himself—­he had been a Calabrian goatherd.  The contralto, who came from Bologna, the city of sausages, gave Margaret a tiny pig made of silver with holes in his back, in which were stuck a number of quill toothpicks.

‘You will think of me when you use them at table,’ she said, charmingly unconscious of English prejudices.

Schreiermeyer presented her with a bronze statuette of Shylock whetting his knife upon his thigh.

‘It will encourage you to sign our next agreement,’ he observed with stony calm.  ’It is the symbol of business.  We are all symbolic nowadays.’

Fraeulein Ottilie Braun had wrought a remarkable little specimen of German sentiment.  She had made a little blue pin-cushion and had embroidered some little flowers on it in brown silk.  Margaret had no difficulty in looking pleased, but she also looked slightly puzzled.

‘They are forget-me-nots,’ said the Fraeulein, ’but because my name is Braun I made them brown.  You see?  So you will remember your little Braun forget-me-not!’

Margaret laughed at the primitively simple little jest, but she was touched too, and somehow she felt that her eyes were not quite dry as she kissed the good little woman again.  But Logotheti could not understand at all, and thought it all extremely silly.  He did not like Margaret’s improvised turban, either, though he recognised the veil as one he had given her.  The headdress was not classic, and he did not think it becoming to the Victory of Samothrace.