This was somewhere near the facts, though stated with a strong friendly bias.  Paula was nervous, never really got into the stride of her acting at all.  The strong discrepancy between Fournier’s methods and Hastings’ served perhaps to prevent her getting into step with either.  And she sang all but badly.  There had been only one rehearsal in the pavilion and at that she had been content merely to sketch her work in, singing off the top of her voice.  When she really opened up at the performance, the unfamiliar acoustics of the place frightened her into forcing, with the result that she was constantly singing sharp.

Paula herself, though disappointed, didn’t feel too badly about it, knowing that all her difficulties were merely matters of adjustment, until she read what the critics said about her in the papers the next morning.  What they said was not on the face of it, severe;—­came, indeed, to much the same thing as Wallace Hood’s verdict.  But the picture between the lines which they unanimously presented, was of a spoiled beauty, restless for the publicity that private life deprived her of, offering in a winning manner to a gullible public, a gold brick.

Paula was furiously angry over this, justifiably, too.  Her work had been professional even in its defects and deserved professional judgment.  The case was serious, too, for if that notion of her once got fairly planted in the minds of her public, it would be almost impossible to eradicate it.

But Anthony March had not been mistaken when he spoke of her as a potential tamer of wild beasts.  Her anger was no mere gush of emotions, to spend itself and leave her exhausted.  It was a sort that hardened in an adamantine resolution.  The next chance she got, she’d show them!  Unluckily, she wasn’t billed to sing again until toward the end of the week.  It happened, however, that the Sunday papers, taking away with one hand, gave in a roundabout but effective fashion with the other.

The opera billed for that night was Pagliacci.  A young American baritone with a phenomenal high A, was to sing “Tonio” and a new Spanish soprano was cast for “Nedda.”  When this young woman saw the Sunday papers she, too, went into a violent rage.  Her knowledge of English was not sufficient to enable her to draw any comfort from the subtle cruelties which the critics had inflicted on Paula in the news section.  But the music and drama supplements which had been printed days before, devoted as they were to the opening of the season, simply made Paula the whole thing.  The Spanish young lady’s rage was of a different quality from Paula’s.  She wept and stormed.  She demanded like Herodias, the head of that press agent on a charger.  Simply that and nothing more.  And when she failed to get it, she went to bed.

The management, disconcerted but by no means at the end of its resources, decreed a change of the bill to Lucia.  They were ready to go on with Lucia which had been billed for Tuesday night.  All they needed was to bring the scenery out from town in a truck.  This they ordered done; but at five o’clock, about two miles south of the park, the truck went through a bridge culvert and rolled all the way to the bottom of a ravine.  The driver escaped with his life but the production of Lucia was smashed to splinters.