United States or Tunisia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It was the evening of Madame Okraska's concert at the old St. James's Hall. London was still the place of the muffled roar and the endearing ugliness. Horse-'buses plied soberly in an unwidened Piccadilly. The private motor was a curiosity. Berlin had not been emulated in an altered Mall nor New York in the façades of giant hotels.
"I beg your pardon," a massive lady dressed in an embroidered sack-like garment, and wearing many strings of iridescent shells around her throat, leaned forward from behind to say: "She is forty-six; I happen to know; a friend of mine has met Madame Okraska's secretary. Forty-six; but she keeps her beauty wonderfully; her figure is quite beautiful."
Slifer, marshalling her girls, and stooping to pat Victor, was introducing herself, and while Gregory told the professor that that was Miss Woodruff, Madame Okraska's ward, she bent to expound to the Slifers the inscription on Victor's collar, speaking, it was evident, with kindness.
Down in the orchestra chairs the audience was roughly to be divided into the technical and the personal devotees; those who chose seats from which they could dwell upon Madame Okraska's full face over the shining surfaces of the piano or upon her profile from the side; and those who, from behind her back, were dedicated to the study of her magical hands.
But now one of her listeners, a lady also in the front row, leaned forward to say hurriedly and deprecatingly, her face suffused with shyness: "That nice young girl is Madame Okraska's adopted daughter. The old lady is Mrs. Forrester, Madame Okraska's great friend; my sister-in-law was for many years a governess in her family, and that is how I come to know."
Isn't Oliver dreadful; he moves from the saddle to the whist-table, and back again; and that is all. Captain Ashton and I have been comparing notes; we find that we have missed hardly any of Madame Okraska's concerts in London. I was only ten when I heard the first she ever gave here; my governess took me; and actually Captain Ashton was here on that day, too. Wasn't she a miracle of loveliness?
"She doesn't look like a peasant," said the girl, with a flavour of discontent, as though a more apparent rusticity would have lent special magnanimity to Madame Okraska's benevolence. But the massive lady assured her: "Oh yes, it is the true Norse type; their peasantry has its patrician quality. I have been to Norway. Sir Alliston looks very much moved, doesn't he?
The tumult and insatiable outcry of the Appassionata spread like a river over her listeners. And as she played her face grew more rapt in its brooding concentration, the eyes half-closed, the nostrils wide, the jaw dropping and giving to the mouth an expression at once relaxed and vigilant. To criticize with the spell of Madame Okraska's personality upon one was hardly possible.
"Yes; and fortunately she was able to sleep for two hours after that. Then Mr. Schultz came and she had to see him, and that was tiring." Mr. Schultz was Madame Okraska's secretary. "Dear, dear, what a pity that he had to bother her. Did she drink the egg-flip I had sent up to her? Mrs. Jenkins makes them excellently as a rule."
Word Of The Day