Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/277

 does that make you sing the way you do? Do you express yourself, or is it technique?"

Simone sat in the bergère at Lucy's feet and poured them each a drink. The girl truly was a child, irresistible, she was not to blame for Paul's being a man. She now felt a desire to protect the beautiful girl, to pamper her and not tell her anything that would, if understood, change the enchanting naturalness. On the other hand she would be quick to sense evasion and one owed it to one's art not to minimize it.

"How old are you?" she asked gently.

"I'll be nineteen in June."

"Just a little more than eighteen! When I was your age I wanted to be an opera singer. I was at the Conservatoire in Paris. My voice was high, clear, and light. Coloratura, but not truly operatic. In one sense I was fortunate. I already knew something about music—many singers do not—as I had had piano lessons at the convent. It was my father's intention I should teach piano in Pau where we lived, unless of course I married. But always I wanted to sing in Paris. My father died, my mother having died long before, and so, being alone, I went, after persuading the family avocat, the lawyer in charge of my dowry, to the Paris Conservatoire. The dowry was little, so he agreed I might as well do this as it was unlikely to attract a suitable young man. After a year I had a patron who was connected with the Opéra Comique and so that was where I sang for some years. The roles were not much varied from year to year and I found it most tiresome. Also my patron. So when I had the opportunity to sing in an operetta, that, I thought, I would enjoy, especially as by now my patron and I no longer agreed on anything. For several years I sang in operetta, in London as well as Paris, and then I lost my voice, which never had been strong. For three years I did not sing a note. I traveled with this friend and that, Greece, Turkey, Italy, always in the South, except when I visited Petrograd. But that is another story. One day in Fez I was so homesick for Paris that I told my then protector, who was in the government, I wished to visit Tetuan in Spanish Morocco, and from there I went by way of Spain to Pau where a few family possessions still remained in care of the avocat. These I wanted to sell; as I now had no protector I was quite poor. I did not get them but that too is another story. However, in Pau I again heard the songs of my childhood and it was as though I had composed them. When I got to Paris I was so poor Rh