What is there that iron is not expected to cure?
To-day Stella is again alone at home; her mother has gone out after lunch to take her bird's-eye view of Paris from the top of an omnibus. She has graciously offered to take Stella with her, but Stella thanks her and declines; she detests riding in omnibuses, on the top she grows dizzy, and inside she becomes ill.
"Well, I suppose the only thing that would really please you would be to drive in a barouche-and-pair in the Bois," her mother remarks. "Unfortunately, that I cannot afford." With which she hurries away.
Stella's throat aches; she often has a throat-ache,--the specific throat-ache of a poor child of mortality who has learned to sing with seven different professors, and whose voice has been treated at different times as a soprano, a mezzo-soprano, and a deep contralto. She has been obliged to stop practising in consequence, to-day, and has taken up a volume of Gibbon, but is too _distraite_ to comprehend what she reads. It really is strange how slight an interest she takes in the decline of the Roman Empire.
"And if I should not succeed upon the stage, if my voice should not turn out well," she constantly asks herself, "what then? what then?"
Why, for a moment--oh, how her cheeks hum as she recalls her delusion!--she absolutely allowed herself to imagine that---- How bitterly she has learned to sneer at her fantastic dreams!
"Has Edmund Rohritz's wife not yet been to see you?" Leskjewitsch had asked her mother in a letter shortly before. "You do not know her, but I begged Edgar awhile ago to send her to you,--she would be so advantageous an acquaintance for Stella."
"She would indeed," the poor child thinks; "but not even his old friend's request has induced him to do me a kindness."
Her sad, weary glance wanders absently over the various lithographs that adorn the walls, portraits of famous singers, Tamberlik, Rubini, Mario, all with the signature of those celebrities. Apparently the hotel must formerly have enjoyed an extensive artistic patronage.
She takes up Gibbon once more, and does her best to become absorbed in the destinies of the tribunes of the people. In vain.
"Good heavens!" she exclaims, irritably, "who could read a serious book in all this noise? And 'The Negroes' was recommended to us as a quiet hotel!"