“You see, I had broken my leg out hunting, and there was a question whether I should be able to get there in time.  Imagine my annoyance on being told I must not speak to her.”

“Who told you that?”

“Madame Savelli.”

“Oh, I understand I You arrived the very day of her first appearance?”

Owen threw up his head and began reading the notices.

“They are all the same,” he said, after reading half a dozen, and Ulick felt relieved.  “But stay, this one is different,” and the long slip dismayed Ulick, who could not feel much interest in the impression that Evelyn had created as Elsa—­he did not know how many years ago.

“’Miss Innes is a tall, graceful woman, who crosses the stage with slow, harmonious movements—­any slight quickening of her step awakening a sense of foreboding in the spectator.  Her eyes, too, are of great avail, and the moment she comes on the stage one is attracted by their strangeness—­grave, mysterious, earnest eyes, which smile rarely; but when they do smile happiness seems to mount up from within, illuminating her life from end to end.  She will never be unhappy again, one thinks.  It is with her smile she recompenses her champion knight when he lays low Telramund, and it is with her smile she wins his love—­and ours.  We regret, for her sake, there are so few smiles in Wagner:  very few indeed—­not one in ‘Senta’ nor in ‘Elizabeth.’” The newspaper cutting slipped from Owen’s hand, and he talked for a long time about her walk and her smile, and then about her “Iphigenia,” which he declared to be one of the most beautiful performances ever seen, her personality lending itself to the incarnation of this Greek idea of fate and self-sacrifice.  But Gluck’s music was, in Owen’s opinion, old-fashioned even at the time it was written—­containing beautiful things, of course, but somewhat stiff in the joints, lacking the clear insight and direct expression of Beethoven’s.  “One man used to write about her very well, and seemed to understand her better than any other.  And writing about this performance he says—­Now, if I could find you his article.”  The search proved a long one, but as it was about to be abandoned Owen turned up the cutting he was in search of.

“’Her nature intended her for the representation of ideal heroines whose love is pure, and it does not allow her to depict the violence of physical passion and the delirium of the senses.  She is an artist of the peaks, whose feet may not descend into the plain and follow its ignominious route,’ And then here:  ’He who has seen her as the spotless spouse of the son of Parsifal, standing by the window, has assisted at the mystery of the chaste soul awaiting the coming of her predestined lover,’ And ’He who has seen her as Elizabeth, ascending the hillside, has felt the nostalgia of the skies awaken in his heart,’ Then he goes on to say that her special genius and her antecedents led her to ‘Fidelio,’ and designed her as the perfect embodiment of Leonore’s soul—­that pure, beautiful soul made wholly of sacrifice and love,’ But you never saw her as Leonore so you can form no idea of what she really was,”