"
"Of course your obbligato'll be all right," Kitty sighed; "but--oh, those
etchers and----Yes, Big Tom'll do; I never see him fretting the Art
Department, like the editor before last, to sketch a one-column earthquake
curdling a cup of cream."
"How _could_ anybody do that?" cried Helen.
"Just what the artist said."
Miss Bryant looked slightly older than Helen; in spite of her brusque,
careless sentences, I suspected that she was a girl of some knowledge,
vast energy and strength of will. And suspicion grew to certainty that she
and Reid were lovers.
I might have read it in his tone when in the course of the evening he
asked her to sing.
"Then give me a baton," she responded, springing to her feet.
Rolling up a newspaper and seizing a bit of charcoal from the drawing
table, she beat time with both hands, launching suddenly into an air which
she rendered with dramatic expression as rare as her abandon.
"Applaud! Applaud!" she cried, clapping her own hands at the end of a
brilliant passage, her colourless, irregular face alive with enthusiasm,
her black eyes snapping. "If you don't applaud, how do you expect me to
sing? _Vos plaudite!_"
"I'll applaud when you've surely stopped," said Kitty Reid demurely; "but
before we begin an evening of grand opera, I want you to hear the
Princess.
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