Page:The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman.djvu/89



LADY ANN (to a friend of proved discretion): I am easily satisfied, I ask for nothing better than a little music after dinner. If only the rising generation were rather less self-conscious. . . When I was a girl, it was a law of the Medes and Persians that, if any one asked us to play or sing, we at once complied. None of this modern absurdity of not playing in public, insisting on the hush of the grave, looking round the room first to see if by chance there is some great maestro present. . . When I tell you that I once sang before Jenny Lind, being too young and ignorant to know who she was. . . And no one could have been sweeter. ..

I am not a musician in any sense of the word. (I am almost tempted to add: “Thank goodness!”) When one sees and hears the devotees at Covent Garden, talking a language of their own which I am quite sure half of them don’t understand, ready to set one right in a moment if one presumes to offer an opinion. . . If any one said to me: “I want to be a social