Page:Wilson - The Boss of Little Arcady (1905).djvu/154

 It was a rare comfort to the Eubanks ladies that Eustace was a bass instead of a tenor. They had observed that most tenor songs are of a suggestive and meretricious character. Arthur Updyke, for example, who clerked in the city drug store, was a tenor, and nearly all of his songs were distressingly sentimental; indeed, fairly indelicate at times in their lack of reserve about kisses and embraces and sighs and ecstasies. Glad indeed were the guardians of Eustace that his voice had lowered to a salutary depth, and that bass songs in general were pure and innocent,—songs of death, of dungeons, of honest war, or of diving beneath the deep blue sea—down, down, down, as far as the singer's chest tones permitted. With "Euty" a tenor, warbling those pernicious boudoir chansons of moonlight and longing of sighing love and anguished passion, they suspected that he would have been harder to manage. Even as it was, he had once brought home a most dreadful thing called "A Bedouin Love Song," for a bass voice, truly enough, but so fearfully outspoken about matters far better left unmentioned among nice people that the three girls had fled horrified from the room after that first verse:—

The mother sped to her daughters' appeal for help and required her son to sing "The Lost Chord" as