Leonora underwent a rapid transformation.  She had already passed her period of growth—­that preadolescent “awkward age” when the features are in constant change before settling down to their definitive forms and the limbs seem to grow longer and longer and thinner and thinner.  The long-legged spindling “flapper,” who was never quite sure where to stow her legs, became the reserved, well-proportioned girl with the mysterious gleam of puberty in her eyes.  Her clothes seemed, naturally, willingly, to curve to her fuller, rounding outlines.  Her skirts went down to her feet and covered the skinny, colt-like appendages that had formerly made the denizens of the Gallery repress a smile.

Her singing master was struck with the beauty of his pupil.  As a tenor, Signor Boldini had had his hour of success back in the days of the Statuto, when Victor Emmanuel was still king of Piedmont and the Austrians were in Milan.  Convinced that he could rise no higher, he had come to earth, stepping aside to let those behind him pass on, turning his stage experience to the advantage of a large class of girl-students whom he fondled with an affectionate, fatherly kindliness.  His white goatee would quiver with admiring enthusiasm, as, playfully, lightly, he would touch his fingers to those virgin throats, which, as he said, were his “property.”  “All for art, and art for all!” And this motto, the ideal of his life, he called it, had quite endeared him to Doctor Moreno.

“That fellow Boldini could not be fonder of my Leonora if she were his own daughter,” the Doctor would say every time the maestro praised the beauty and the talent of his pupil and prophesied great triumphs for her.

And Leonora went on with her lessons, accepting the light, the playful, the innocent caresses of the old singer; until one afternoon, in the midst of a romanza, there was a hateful scene:  the maestro, despite her horrified struggling, claimed a feudal right—­the first fruits of her initiation into theatrical life.

Through fear of her father Leonora kept silent.  What might he not do on finding his blind confidence in the maestro so betrayed?  She sank into resigned passivity at last, and continued to visit Boldini’s house daily, learning ultimately to accept, as a matter of professional course, the repulsive flattery of refined vice.

Poor Leonora entered on a life of wrong through the open door, learning, at a single stroke, all the turpitude acquired by that shrivelled maestro during his long career back-stage.  Boldini would have kept her a pupil forever.  He could never find her just well enough prepared to make her debut.  But hardly any money was coming from Spain now.  Poor dona Pepa had sold everything her brother owned and a good deal of her own land besides.  Only at the cost of painful stinting could she send him anything at all.  The Doctor, through connections with itinerant directors and impresarios a l’aventure,