For a moment it seemed to Lady Holme as if she and the American were
merely victims of the morbid conditions amid which they lived; conditions
which caused the natural vanity of women to become a destroying fever,
the natural striving of women to please a venomous battle, the natural
desire of women to be loved a fracas, in which clothes were the armour,
modes of hair-dressing, manicure, perfumes, dyes, powder-puffs the
weapons.
What a tremendous, noisy nothingness it was, this state of being! How
could an angel be natural in it,--be an angel at all?
She laid down the programme and sighed. She felt a vague yet violent
desire for release, for a fierce change, for something that would brush
away the spider's web and set free her wings. Yet where would she fly?
She did not know; probably against a window-pane. And the change would
never come. She and Fritz--what could they ever be but a successful
couple known in a certain world and never moving beyond its orbit?
Perhaps for the first time the longing that she had often expressed in
her singing, obedient to poet and composer, invaded her own soul. Without
music she was what with music she had often seemed to be--a creature of
wayward and romantic desires, a yearning spirit, a soaring flame.
At that moment she could have sung better than she had ever sung.
On the programme the names of her songs did not appear. They were
represented by the letters A and B.
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