“In the last act, madness was tangled in her hair, and in her wide-open eyes were read the workings of her insane brain, and her every movement expressed the pathos of madness; her lovely voice told its sad tale without losing any of its sweetness and beauty.  The pathos of the little souvenir phrases was almost unbearable, and the tragic power of the finish was extraordinary in a voice of such rare distinction and fluid utterance.  Her singing and acting went hand in hand, twin sisters, equal and indivisible, and when the great moment in the trio came, she stepped forward and with an inspired intensity lifted her quivering hands above her head in a sort of mad ecstasy, and sang out the note clear and true, yet throbbing with emotion.”

The paper slid from Evelyn’s hand.  She could see from Ulick’s description of her acting that she had acted very well; if she had not, he could not have written like that.  But her acting only seemed extraordinary when she read about it.  It was all so natural to her.  She simply went on the stage, and once she was on the stage she could not do otherwise.  She could not tell why she did things.  Her acting was so much a part of herself that she could not think of it as an art at all; it was merely a medium through which she was able to re-live past phases of her life, or to exhibit her present life in a more intense and concentrated form.  The dropping of the book was quite true; she had dropped a piece of music when she first saw Owen, and the omission of the scream was natural to her.  She felt sure that she would not have seen Mephistopheles just then; she would have been too busy thinking of the young man.  But she thought that she might take a little credit for her entrance in the third act.  Somehow her predecessors had not seen that it was absurd to come smiling and tripping out of church, where she had seen Mephistopheles.  She read the lines describing her power to depict madness.  But even in the mad scenes she was not conscious of having invented anything.  She had had sensations of madness—­she supposed everyone had—­and she threw herself into those sensations, intensifying them, giving them more prominence on the stage than they had had in her own personal life.

Many had thought her a greater actress than a singer; and she had been advised to dispense with her voice and challenge a verdict on her speaking voice in one of Shakespeare’s plays.  Owen would have liked her to risk the adventure, but she dared not.  It would seem a wanton insult to her voice.  She had imagined that it might leave her as an offended spirit might leave its local habitation.  Her Margaret had been accepted in Italy, so she must sing it as well as she acted it.  But when she had asked the Marquis d’Albazzi if she sang it as well as her mother, he had said, “Mademoiselle, the singers of my day were as exquisite flutes, and the singers of your day give emotions that no flute could give me,” and when she had told him that she