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 I climbed to the model-chair, seated myself, grasped the green book that was part of the composition, and automatically assumed that woebegone expression that is worn by all amateurs who pose for their portraits.

That won't do at all, said Martha. I asked Clara to come here to amuse you.

Clara tried. She told me that she was studying Manon and that she had been to the Opéra-Comique fifteen times to hear the opera.

Garden is all wrong in it, all wrong, she continued. In the first place she can't sing. Of course she's pretty, but she's not my idea of Manon at all. I will really sing the part and act it too.

A month or two later, while we munched sandwiches and drank beer between the acts of Tristan und Isolde in the foyer of the Prinzregenten Theater in Munich, Olive Fremstad introduced me to an American girl, who informed me that a new Isolde had been born that day.

I shall be the great Isolde, she remarked casually, and her name, I gathered, when I asked Madame Fremstad to repeat it, was Minnie Saltzmann-Stevens.

But on the day that Clara spoke of her future triumphs in Manon, I had yet to become accustomed to this confidence with which beginners in the vocal art seem so richly endowed, a confidence which is frequently disturbed by circumstances for, as George Moore has somewhere said, our dreams and our