the ineffably sweet and worshipful soul of the Umbrian saint in its flowerlike adoration of the daintiness of earth; and as she crooned the almost sexless tenderness of the music, there seemed a sudden irradiation of the pale aureolas of the Italian primitives about her girlish head. And, last, she became an image of the bonfire, flaring with it as its tongues licked upward about the subservient wood, snapping and scattering joyous sparks of tone into the blue of night.
What must have helped fix the image of the bonfire on that of the girl standing white-shouldered above the grand piano was the furtive glimpse of her history given me by a gossip directly after her performance was at an end. That, too, brought to mind a sudden conflagration. My gossip had known her some ten years since as a prim timid little music-student from the American provinces; "the most mousey and whaleboned of little things." Later, it seems, she had gone in despair to Lago Maggiore; and there the director of an itinerant grand opera company had become interested in her. This man it was, my informant pretended, who had produced her talent. Then—suddenly, she had been engaged by the Metropolitan, and had appeared in New York, a very triumphant swan, a victorious personality, grown out of the quakerish sparrow.
Again, the second and last time I saw her, on the afternoon on which she sang one of the two solo parts in Sam Thewman's Der Abend, the image renewed itself. It was in vain she tried to give herself in carolling the dubious stuff. Though the composer in the conductor's stand tried to help matters out by assuming every now and then the pose of the descending sungod in the large Boucher on the staircase of the Wallace Collection, the music of roseate sunset would not come; there was nothing for Alice Miriam to sing. And as she stood there, the one to sing Mélisande; so birdlike and hectic; with an expression of almost maladif eagerness in her face, it was so intense; there recited themselves in my head in place of Schillers verses, the lines
"Ungesättigt gleich der Flamme
Glühe und verzehr' ich mich.
Licht wird Alles was ich fasse,
Kohle, Alles was ich lasse;
Flamme bin ich sicherlich!"
