Poppas was indispensable to her.  He was like a book in which she had written down more about herself than she could possibly remember—­and it was information that she might need at any moment.  He was the one person who knew her absolutely and who saw into the bottom of her grief.  An artist’s saddest secrets are those that have to do with his artistry.  Poppas knew all the simple things that were so desperately hard for Cressida, all the difficult things in which she could count on herself; her stupidities and inconsistencies, the chiaroscuro of the voice itself and what could be expected from the mind somewhat mismated with it.  He knew where she was sound and where she was mended.  With him she could share the depressing knowledge of what a wretchedly faulty thing any productive faculty is.

But if Poppas was necessary to her career, she was his career.  By the time Cressida left the Metropolitan Opera Company, Poppas was a rich man.  He had always received a retaining fee and a percentage of her salary,—­and he was a man of simple habits.  Her liberality with Poppas was one of the weapons that Horace and the Garnets used against Cressida, and it was a point in the argument by which they justified to themselves their rapacity.  Whatever they didn’t get, they told themselves, Poppas would.  What they got, therefore, they were only saving from Poppas.  The Greek ached a good deal at the general pillage, and Cressida’s conciliatory methods with her family made him sarcastic and spiteful.  But he had to make terms, somehow, with the Garnets and Horace, and with the husband, if there happened to be one.  He sometimes reminded them, when they fell to wrangling, that they must not, after all, overturn the boat under them, and that it would be better to stop just before they drove her wild than just after.  As he was the only one among them who understood the sources of her fortune,—­and they knew it,—­he was able, when it came to a general set-to, to proclaim sanctuary for the goose that laid the golden eggs.

That Poppas had caused the break between Cressida and McChord was another stick her sisters held over her.  They pretended to understand perfectly, and were always explaining what they termed her “separation”; but they let Cressida know that it cast a shadow over her family and took a good deal of living down.

A beautiful soundness of body, a seemingly exhaustless vitality, and a certain “squareness” of character as well as of mind, gave Cressida Garnet earning powers that were exceptional even in her lavishly rewarded profession.  Managers chose her over the heads of singers much more gifted, because she was so sane, so conscientious, and above all, because she was so sure.  Her efficiency was like a beacon to lightly anchored men, and in the intervals between her marriages she had as many suitors as Penelope.  Whatever else they saw in her at first, her competency so impressed and delighted them that they gradually