wanted to sing, and she could not, and she had wanted—­she had not known what was the matter with her.  That feeling (how well she remembered it!) as if she wanted to go mad!  And all those lightnesses of the brain she could introduce in the opening scene—­the very opening cry was one of them.  And with these two themes she thought she could create an Isolde more intense than the Isolde of the fat women whom she had seen walking about the stage, lifting their arms and trying to look like sculpture.

No one whom she had seen had attempted to differentiate between Isolde before she drinks and after she has drunk the love potion, and, to avoid this mistake, she felt that she would only have to be true to herself.  After the love potion had been drunk, the moment of her life to put on the stage was its moment of highest sexual exaltation.  Which was that?  There were so many, she smiled in her doze.  Perhaps the most wonderful day of her life was the day Madame Savelli had said, “If you’ll stay with me for a year, I’ll make something wonderful of you.”  She recalled the drive in the Bois, and she saw again the greensward, the poplars, and the stream of carriages.  She had hardly been able so resist springing up in the carriage and singing to the people; she had wanted to tell them what Madame Savelli had said.  She had wished to cry to them, “In two years all you people will be going to the opera to hear me.”  What had stopped her was the dread that it might not happen.  But it had happened!  That was the evening she had met Olive.  She could see the exact spot.  Although Olive had only just arrived, she had been up to her room and put on a pair of slippers.  They had dined at a cafe, and all through dinner she had longed to be alone with Owen, and after dinner the time had seemed so long.  Before going up in the lift he had asked her if he might come to her room.  In a quarter of an hour, she had said, but he had come sooner than she expected, and she remembered slipping her arm into a gauze wrapper.  How she had flung herself into his arms!  That was the moment of her life to put upon the stage when she and Tristan look at each other after drinking the love potion.

In the second act Tristan lives through her.  She is the will to live; and if she ultimately consents to follow him into the shadowy land, it is for love of him.  But of his desire for death she understands nothing; all through the duet it is she who desires to quench this desire with kisses.  That was her conception of women’s mission, and that was her own life with Owen; it was her love that compelled him to live down his despondencies.  So her Isolde would have an intense and a personal life that no Isolde had had before.  And in holding up her own soul to view, she would hold up the universal soul, and people would be afraid to turn their heads lest they should catch each other’s eyes.  But was not a portrayal of sexual passion such as she intended very sinful?  It could not fail to suggest sinful thoughts....  She could not help what folk thought—­that was their affair.  She had turned her back upon all such scruples, and this last one she contemptuously picked up and tossed aside like a briar.