On her singing nights she dined at half-past five, and the interval after dinner she spent in looking through her part, humming bits of it to herself, but to-day Lady Duckle was quick to remark the score of “Tannhaeuser” in her hand.  She sat with it on her knees, looking at it only occasionally, for she was thinking how the music would appeal to her father, and how her mother would have sung it.  But she had to abandon these vain speculations.  She must play the part as she felt it, to tamper with her conception would be to court failure.  To please herself was her only chance of pleasing her father; if he did not like her reading of the part, if her singing did not please him, it was very unfortunate, but could not be helped.  And when the carriage came to take her to the theatre, she was not sure that she would not be glad to receive a telegram saying that he was prevented from coming.  She was very nervous while dressing, and on coming downstairs she stood watching the stage-box where he was sitting.  She could distinguish his handsome, grave face through the shadows, and the orchestra was playing that rather rhetorical address to the halls which neither she nor Ulick cared much about.  She waited, forgetful of her entrance, and she had to hurry round to the back of the stage.

But the moment the curtain went up, she became the mediaeval German princess; her other life fell behind her, and her father was but a little shadow on her brain.  Yet he was the inspiration of her acting, and that night the whole theatre consisted for Evelyn of one stage-box.  Her eyes never wandered there, but she knew that there sat her ultimate judge, one whom no excess or trick could deceive.  He would not judge her by the mere superficial appearance she presented on the stage, by the superficial qualities of her voice or her acting; he would see to the origin of the idea, whence it had sprung, and how it had been developed.  He did not know this particular opera, but he knew all music, and would judge it and her not according to the capricious taste of the moment, but in its relation and her relation to the immutable canons of art, from the plain chant to Palestrina, from Palestrina to Bach and Beethoven.  Her singing of every phrase would be passed as it were through the long tradition of the centuries; it would not be accepted as an isolated fact, it would be judged good, indifferent or bad, by learned technical comparison.  That she was his daughter would weigh not a hair’s weight in the scale, and the knowledge of this terrible justice raised her out of herself, detached her more completely from the superficial and the vulgar.  She sang and acted as in a dream, hypnotised by her audience, her exaltation steeped in somnambulism and steeped in ecstasy.