Mr. Wheeler suggested that they might go on with the rehearsal; the cut could be discussed afterwards.  Groups formed, everyone had a different opinion.  At last the conductor took up his stick and cried, “Number 105, please.”

“They are going back,” thought Ulick; “she held her ground capitally.  She has more strength of character than I thought.  But Hermann Goetze has upset her; she won’t be able to sing.”

And it was as he expected; she could not recapture her lost inspiration; mood, Ulick could see, was the foundation and the keystone of her art.

“No,” she said, “I sang it horribly, I am all out of sorts, I don’t feel what I am singing, and when the mood is not upon me, I am atrocious.  What annoyed me was his attributing such selfishness to me, and such vulgar selfishness, too—­”

“However, you had your way about the cut.”

“Yes, they’ll have to sing the whole of the finale.  But I am sorry about his tooth; I know that it is dreadful pain.”

Ulick told an amusing story how he had once called on Hermann Goetze to ask if he had read the book of his opera.

“He’d just gone into an adjoining room to fetch a clothes-brush—­he had taken off his coat to brush it—­but the moment he saw me, he whipped out his handkerchief and said that he must go to the dentist.”

“And when I asked him to engage Helbrun to sing Brangaene, and give her eighty pounds a week if she wouldn’t sing it for less, he whipped out his handkerchief as you say, and asked me if I knew a dentist.”

“The idea of Wagner without cuts always brings on a violent attack,” and Ulick imitated so well the expression of agony that had come into the manager’s face that Evelyn exploded with laughter.  She begged Ulick to desist.

“I shan’t be able to sing at all.  But I have not told you of my make up.  I don’t look at all pretty; the ugly curls I wear come from an old German print, and the staid, modest gown.  But it is very provoking; I was singing well till that fiend began to argue.  Don’t make me laugh again.”

He became very grave.

“I can only think of the joy you gave me.”

His praise brightened her face, and she listened.

“I cannot tell you now what I feel; perhaps I shall never find words to express what I feel about your Elizabeth.  I shall be writing about it next week, and shall have to try.”

“Do tell me now.  You liked it better than my Margaret?”

Ulick shrugged his shoulders contemptuously, and they looked in each other’s eyes, and could hardly speak, so extraordinary was their recognition of each other; it was so intense that they could hardly help laughing, so strange it seemed that they should never have met before, or should have been separated for such a long time.  It really seemed to them as if they had known each other from all eternity.

“How can you act Elizabeth, she is so different from what you are?”