affable.  One has, under such circumstances, to be either gracious or pouty.  Either you have to stand and sulk, like an old-fashioned German singer who wants the piano moved about for her like a tea-wagon, and the lights turned up and the lights turned down,—­or you have to be a trifle forced, like a debutante trying to make good.  The fixed attention of my audience affected me.  I was aware of unusual interest, of a thoroughly enlisted public.  When, however, my host at last left me, I felt the tension relax to such an extent that I wondered whether by any chance he, and not I, was the object of so much curiosity.  But, at any rate, their cordiality pleased me so well that after Peppo and I had finished our numbers I sang an encore or two, and I stayed through Peppo’s performance because I felt that they liked to look at me.

“I had asked not to be presented to people, but Mrs. Stein, of course, brought up a few friends.  The throng began closing in upon me, glowing faces bore down from every direction, and I realized that, among people of such unscrupulous cordiality, I must look out for myself.  I ran through the drawing-room and fled up the stairway, which was thronged with Old Testament characters.  As I passed them, they all looked at me with delighted, cherishing eyes, as if I had at last come back to my native hamlet.  At the top of the stairway a young man, who looked like a camel with its hair parted on the side, stopped me, seized my hands and said he must present himself, as he was such an old friend of Siegmund’s bachelor days.  I said, ‘Yes, how interesting!’ The atmosphere was somehow so thick and personal that I felt uncomfortable.

“When I reached my dressing-room Mrs. Stein followed me to say that I would, of course, come down to supper, as a special table had been prepared for me.  I replied that it was not my custom.

“’But here it is different.  With us you must feel perfect freedom.  Siegmund will never forgive me if you do not stay.  After supper our car will take you home.’  She was overpowering.  She had the manner of an intimate and indulgent friend of long standing.  She seemed to have come to make me a visit.  I could only get rid of her by telling her that I must see Peppo at once, if she would be good enough to send him to me.  She did not come back, and I began to fear that I would actually be dragged down to supper.  It was as if I had been kidnapped.  I felt like Gulliver among the giants.  These people were all too—­well, too much what they were.  No chill of manner could hold them off.  I was defenseless.  I must get away.  I ran to the top of the staircase and looked down.  There was that fool Peppo, beleaguered by a bevy of fair women.  They were simply looting him, and he was grinning like an idiot.  I gathered up my train, ran down, and made a dash at him, yanked him out of that circle of rich contours, and dragged him by a limp cuff up the stairs after me.  I told him that I must escape from that house at once.  If he could get to the telephone, well and good; but if he couldn’t get past so many deep-breathing ladies, then he must break out of the front door and hunt me a cab on foot.  I felt as if I were about to be immured within a harem.