These short glimpses at reflection in Victor were like the verberant twang of a musical instrument that has had a smart blow, and wails away independent of the player’s cunning hand.  He would have said, that he was more his natural self when the cunning hand played on him, to make him praise and uplift his beloved:  mightily would it have astonished him to contemplate with assured perception in his own person the Nature he invoked.  But men invoking Nature, do not find in her the Holy Mother she in such case becomes to her daughters, whom she so persecutes.  Men call on her for their defence, as a favourable witness:  she is a note of their rhetoric.  They are not bettered by her sustainment; they have not, as women may have, her enaemic aid at a trying hour.  It is not an effort at epigram to say, that whom she scourges most she most supports.

An Opera-placard drew his next remark to Fenellan.

’How Wagner seems to have stricken the Italians!  Well, now, the Germans have their Emperor to head their armies, and I say that the German emperor has done less for their lasting fame and influence than Wagner has done.  He has affected the French too; I trace him in Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette—­and we don’t gain by it; we have a poor remuneration for the melody gone; think of the little shepherd’s pipeing in Mireille; and there’s another in Sapho-delicious.  I held out against Wagner as long as I could.  The Italians don’t much more than Wagnerize in exchange for the loss of melody.  They would be wiser in going back to Pergolese, Campagnole.  The Mefistofole was good—­of the school of the foreign master.  Aida and Otello, no.  I confess to a weakness for the old barleysugar of Bellini or a Donizetti-Serenade.  Aren’t you seduced by cadences?  Never mind Wagner’s tap of his paedagogue’s baton—­a cadence catches me still.  Early taste for barley-sugar, perhaps!  There’s a march in Verdi’s Attila and I Lombardi, I declare I’m in military step when I hear them, as in the old days, after leaving the Opera.  Fredi takes little Mab Mountney to her first Opera to-night.  Enough to make us old ones envious!  You remember your first Opera, Fenellan?  Sonnambula, with me.  I tell you, it would task the highest poetry—­say, require, if you like—­showing all that’s noblest, splendidest, in a young man, to describe its effect on me.  I was dreaming of my box at the Opera for a year after.  The Huguenots to-night.  Not the best suited for little Mabsy; but she’ll catch at the Rataplan.  Capital Opera; we used to think it the best, before we had Tannhauser and Lohengrin and the Meistersinger.’