“Sit down, Evelyn, you look tired.”

“No, I’m not tired ... but I walked from the Arc de Triomphe.”

“Walked!  Why did you walk?”

Evelyn did not answer, and Lady Duckle said—­

“Sir Owen tells me that you’ll surely succeed in singing Wagner—­that I shall be converted.”

“Lady Duckle is a heretic.”

“No, my dear Owen, I’m not a heretic, for I recognise the greatness of the music, and I could hear it with pleasure if it were confined to the orchestra, but I can find no pleasure in listening to a voice trying to accompany a hundred instruments.  I heard ‘Lohengrin’ last season.  I was in Mrs. Ayre’s box—­a charming woman—­her husband is an American, but he never comes to London.  I presented her at the last Drawing-Room.  She had a supper party afterwards, and when she asked me what I’d have to eat, I said, ‘Nothing with wings’ ...  Oh, that swan!”

Her grey hair was drawn up and elaborately arranged, and Evelyn noticed three diamond rings and an emerald ring on her fat, white fingers.  There had been moments she said, when she had thought the people on the stage were making fun of them—­“such booing!”—­they had all shouted themselves hoarse—­such wandering from key to key.

“Hoping, I suppose, that in the end they’d hit off the right ones.  And that trick of going up in fifths.  And then they go up in fifths on the half notes.  I said if they do that again, I’ll leave the theatre.”

Evelyn could see that Owen liked Lady Duckle, and her conversation, which at first might have seemed extravagant and a little foolish, was illuminated with knowledge and a vague sense of humour which was captivating.  Her story of how she had met Rossini in her early youth, and the praise he had bestowed on her voice, and his intention of writing an opera for her, seemed fanciful enough, but every now and then some slight detail inspired the suspicion that there was perhaps more truth in what she was saying than appeared at first hearing.

“Why did he not write the opera, Olive?”

“It was just as he was ill, when he lived in Rue Monsieur.  And he said he was afraid he was not equal to writing down so many notes.  Poor old man!  I can still see him sitting in his arm-chair.”

She seemed to have been on terms of friendship with the most celebrated men of the time.  Her little book entitled Souvenirs of Some Great Composers was alluded to, and Owen mentioned that at that time she was the great Parisian beauty.

“But instead of going on the stage, I married Lord Duckle.”

And this early mistake she seemed to consider as sufficient explanation for all subsequent misfortunes.  Evelyn wondered what these might be, and Owen said—­

“The most celebrated singers are glad to sing at Lady Duckle’s afternoons; no reputation is considered complete till it has received her sanction.”

“That is going too far, Owen; but it is true that nearly all the great singers have been heard at my house.”