She had a peculiar power of awakening in others that which she usually
seemed not to possess herself--imagination, passion, not only physical
but ethereal and of the mind; a tenderness for old sorrows, desire for
distant, fleeting, misty glories not surely of this earth. She was a
brilliant suggestionist, but not in conversation. Her face and her voice,
when she sang, were luring to the lovers of beauty. When she sang she
often expressed for them the under-thoughts and under-feelings of
secretly romantic, secretly wistful men and women, and drew them to her
as if by a spell. But her talk and manner in conversation were so unlike
her singing, so little accorded with the look that often came into her
eyes while she sang, that she was a perpetual puzzle to such elderly men
as Sir Donald Ulford, to such young men as Robin Pierce, and even to some
women. They came about her like beggars who have heard a chink of gold,
and she showed them a purse that seemed to be empty.
Was it the /milieu/ in which she lived, the influence of a vulgar and
greedy age, which prevented her from showing her true self except in her
art? Or was she that stupefying enigma sometimes met with, an
unintelligent genius?
There were some who wondered.
In her singing she seemed to understand, to love, to pity, to enthrone.
In her life she often seemed not to understand, not to love, not to pity,
not to place high.
She sang of Venice, and those who cannot even think of the city in the
sea without a flutter of the heart, a feeling not far from soft pain in
its tenderness and gratitude, listened to the magic bells at sunset, and
glided in the fairy barques across the liquid plains of gold.
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