On account of the numerous rehearsals demanded by Evelyn for the production of “Tristan and Isolde,” Mr. Hermann Goetze’s opera season was limited to four nights a week.  But the hours she spent in the theatre were only a small part of the time she devoted to her idea.  Her entire life was lived in or about the new incarnation, her whole life seemed to converge and rush into an ultimate channel, and Lady Ascott sought her in vain.  She avoided social distractions, and the friends she saw were those who could talk to her about her idea.  But while listening she forgot them, and absorbed in her dream strayed round the piano.  She meditated journeys to Cornwall and Brittany; and one day when Owen called he heard that she had gone to Ireland, and was expected back to-morrow evening.  She read Isolde into the morning paper, receiving hints from the cases that came up before the magistrates.  She found Isolde in every book, all that happened seemed extraordinarily fortuitous, the light of her idea revealing significance in the most ordinary things.  Her life was ransacked like an old work-box, all kinds of stages of mentality, opinions, beliefs, prejudices, trite and conventional enough, came up and were thrown aside.  But now and then the memory of an emotion, of a feeling, would prove to be just what she wanted to add a moment’s life to her Isolde; the memory of a gesture, of a look was sufficient, and she sank back in her chair, her eyes dilated and moody, thinking how she could work this truth to herself into the harmony of the picture she was elaborating.

Evelyn had seen Rosa Sucher play the part, and had admired her rendering as far as we can admire that which is not only antagonistic, but even discordant to our own natures.  She admitted it to be very sweeping, triumphant and loud, a fine braying of trumpets from the rise to the fall of the curtain.  Rosa Sucher had no doubt attained an extraordinary oneness of idea, but at what price?  Her Isolde was a hurricane, a sort of avalanche; and the woman was lost in the storm.  She had missed the magic of the woman who, personal to our flesh and dream, breaks upon our life like the Spring; and this was just what Evelyn wanted to out on the stage.  There was plenty of breadth, but it was breadth at the price of accent.  There was a great frame and a sort of design within the frame, but in Evelyn’s sense the picture was wanting.  There was an extraordinary and incomprehensible neglect of that personal accent without which there is no life.  And the difference between the Isolde who has not drunk, and the Isolde who has drunk the love potion which she, Evelyn, was so intent upon indicating, had never occurred to Rosa Sucher, or if it had, it had been swept aside as a negligible detail.  After all, Isolde has to be a woman a man could be in love with, and that is not the impact and the shriek of a gale from the south-west.  No doubt Rosa Sucher’s idea of the part was Wagner’s idea at one moment of his life.