Apparently it hadn't come. He made the excuse that I
ought to have stayed with him longer. It would hurt his reputation to
launch a pupil too soon. So I had to try to launch myself. And it
didn't work. One manager of opera companies on whom I forced myself
tested my voice and said it wasn't strong enough--only a twilight
voice for a drawing-room, he called it. I was broken up--just at
first."
"Poor child!" Peter muttered, but the girl's quick ears caught the
words over the roar of that "ill wind" which had brought them
together.
"Child is my surname, and it's not polite to call me by it." She
brought him to his bearings by suddenly "frivolling" again. "They call
militant suffragettes and housemaids sent to prison for stealing their
kind mistresses' jewels by their surnames. I'm not a militant; and
I've not been a housemaid yet, though I may be, if New York isn't
kinder to me than London."
"I hope it will be--kind in just the right way!"
"My friend who gave me the two letters of introduction says it will:
that Americans _love_ English girls, if they have the courage to come
over. She says there are heaps more chances as well as heaps more room
for us in that country than there are at home.
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