That the chapter which began so gracefully ran on into such a stretch of grim, hard prose, was simply Cressida’s relentless bad luck.  In her undertakings, in whatever she could lay hold of with her two hands, she was successful; but whatever happened to her was almost sure to be bad.  Her family, her husbands, her son, would have crushed any other woman I have ever known.  Cressida lived, more than most of us, “for others”; and what she seemed to promote among her beneficiaries was indolence and envy and discord—­even dishonesty and turpitude.

Her sisters were fond of saying—­at club luncheons—­that Cressida had remained “untouched by the breath of scandal,” which was not strictly true.  There were captious people who objected to her long and close association with Miletus Poppas.  Her second husband, Ransome McChord, the foreign representative of the great McChord Harvester Company, whom she married in Germany, had so persistently objected to Poppas that she was eventually forced to choose between them.  Any one who knew her well could easily understand why she chose Poppas.

While her actual self was the least changed, the least modified by experience that it would be possible to imagine, there had been, professionally, two Cressida Garnets; the big handsome girl, already a “popular favourite” of the concert stage, who took with her to Germany the raw material of a great voice;—­and the accomplished artist who came back.  The singer that returned was largely the work of Miletus Poppas.  Cressida had at least known what she needed, hunted for it, found it, and held fast to it.  After experimenting with a score of teachers and accompanists, she settled down to work her problem out with Poppas.  Other coaches came and went—­she was always trying new ones—­but Poppas survived them all.  Cressida was not musically intelligent; she never became so.  Who does not remember the countless rehearsals which were necessary before she first sang Isolde in Berlin; the disgust of the conductor, the sullenness of the tenor, the rages of the blonde teufelin, boiling with the impatience of youth and genius, who sang her Brangaena?  Everything but her driving power Cressida had to get from the outside.

Poppas was, in his way, quite as incomplete as his pupil.  He possessed a great many valuable things for which there is no market; intuitions, discrimination, imagination, a whole twilight world of intentions and shadowy beginnings which were dark to Cressida.  I remember that when “Trilby” was published she fell into a fright and said such books ought to be prohibited by law; which gave me an intimation of what their relationship had actually become.