Page:Our Little Girl (1923).pdf/86

 She decided finally that the one-time opera singer was no chemist.

Contrary to all tradition, Mme. Graaberg had high praise for the instruction of Mme. Schneider-Miss Eldridge.

“You have been taught to breathe, my child,” she would say in her rather meticulous English, of which only the intonation betrayed a foreign origin. “Somebody has taught you how to support your tone. You lucky girl!” Mme. Graaberg’s texts for vocal sermons seemed to be derived chiefly from the life of her late husband, an obscure tenor, who so far as Dorothy could learn, had never achieved success because of his capacity for conviviality and his incapacity for singing upper tones.

“Diction! diction!’ she would cry out, as Dorothy bent all of her energies on producing a smooth tone. “Ah, my child, diction is very important. My poor Paul-

“When his voice was almost gone—but you should have heard it when he was young—but they never gave him a chance in the big opera—when his voice was almost gone, he sang with me in Amsterdam. Manrico he sang. Think of that? Such a hard tenore robusto part and his voice is nothing, only a shadow. Here and there a note like in the old days, but that is all. And so many big arias and duets with so many hard high notes! “He could not really sing any more, the other men used to say. These young fellows with their bull throats! They would laugh when he took his high C falsetto because he could not sing it full voice. Ah, but once he could sing it to shake the chandeliers! They would laugh when he sang that big aria because he could not shout out big tones. But my Paul was an artist.

“And that night, when he came to that cruel aria with its high C, I could see the young tenors standing in the