And she began to tell him stories of her professional career, which Rafael at once appraised as new progress toward intimacy with the divine beauty.

He looked over her pictures for the various operas in which she had sung; a rich collection of beautiful photographs, with studio signatures in almost every European tongue, some of them in strange alphabets that Rafael could not identify.  That pale, mystic Elizabeth of Tannhaeuser had been taken in Milan; that ideal, romantic Elsa of Lohengrin, in Munich; here was a wide-eyed, bourgeois Eva from die Meistersinger, photographed in Vienna; there a proud arrogant Brunhilde, with hostile, flashing eyes, that bore the imprint of St. Petersburg.  And there were other souvenirs of seasons at Covent Garden, at the San Carlos of Lisbon, the Scala of Milan, and opera houses of New York and Rio de Janeiro.

As Rafael handled the large pasteboard mountings, he felt much like a boy watching strange steamers entering a harbor and scattering the perfumes of distant, mysterious lands all around.  Each picture seemed to wrap him in the atmosphere of its country, and from that peaceful salon, murmuring with the breathing of the silent orchard, he seemed to be traveling all over the earth.

The photographs were all of the same characters—­heroines of Wagner.  Leonora, a fanatic worshipper of the German genius, was ever speaking of him in terms of intimate familiarity, as if she had known him personally, and wished to sing no operas but his.  And in her eager desire to compass all the Master’s work, she did not hesitate to compromise her reputation for power and vigor by attempting roles of lighter or tenderer vein.

Rafael gazed at the portraits one by one; here she seemed emaciated, wan, as if she had just recovered from an illness; there, she was strong and proud, as if challenging the world with her beauty.

“Oh, Rafael!” she murmured pensively.  “Life isn’t all gaiety.  I have had my stormy times like everybody else.  I have lived centuries, it seems, and these strips of cardboard are chapters of my life-story.”

And while she surrendered to a dreamy re-living of the past, Rafael would go into ecstasies over a picture of Brunhilde, a beautiful photograph which he had more than once thought of stealing.

That Brunhilde was Leonora herself; the arrogant Valkyrie, the strong, the valiant Amazon, capable of trying to beat him for the slightest unwarranted liberty he took—­and of doing it besides.  Beneath the helmet of polished steel, with its two wings of white plumes, her blond locks fell, while a savage flash glittered in her green eyes, and her nostrils seemed to palpitate with indomitable fierceness.  A cloak fell from her shoulders that were round, muscular, powerful.  A steel coat of mail curved outward around her magnificent bust, and her bare arms, one holding the lance, and the other resting on a burnished