Italian opera appealed to Jenny most. She did not care greatly for "Tannhaeuser," thinking the Venusberg ballet very poor and Venus herself a sight. Teutonic extravagance affected her with a slight sense of discomfort as of being placed too near trombones. Her training as a dancer had begotten a feeling of meticulous form which the expansive harmonies of Wagner disconcerted. Jenny did not enjoy suffering a sea-change. Novelty and strangeness were to her merely peculiar. Strauss would have bored her, not as Brahms might have bored her to somnolence, but as an irritating personality bores one to rudeness or sudden flight. To speculate how far it might have been advisable to hang her intelligence with Gothic tapestries is not worth while. Probably the imposition of decorated barbarism on her lucid and sensitive enjoyment of Verdi would have obscured the small windows of her soul with gloomy arras. Notwithstanding her education at the board school, she had a view, and it was better she should preserve an instinct for a sanity that was sometimes pathos rather than, in the acquirement of an epileptic appreciation, she should lose what was, after all, a classical feeling in her sensuous love of obvious beauty. The sugar-plums of Italian opera melted innocently in her mouth, leaving behind them nothing but a memory of sweetness, as one steps from a garden of shaded bird-song with a thought of music. Wagner was more intoxicating, but bequeathed no limpid exultation to the heart of the wearied listener. Moreover, she had a very real sense of being a square peg in a round hole when she and the other minions of Venus tripped round the frequent rocks of Venusberg. It was as if a confectioner had stuck a shepherdess of pink icing on the top of a plum-pudding. Jenny felt, in her own words, that it was all unnatural. There was nothing of Walpurgis in their stereotyped allurement. It was Bobbing Joan in Canterbury Close. The violins might wail through the darkened opera house, but an obese Tannhaeuser caught by the wiles of an adipose Venus during the inexpressive seductions of an Italian ballet was silly; the poses to be sustained were fatiguing and ineffective. More fatiguing still was Jenny's almost unendurable waiting as page while the competitors sang to Elizabeth. There were four pages in purple velvet tunics. Jenny looked her part, but the other three looked like Victoria plums. The one scene in German opera that she really enjoyed was the Valkyries' ride, when she and a few selected girls were strapped high up to the enchanted horses and rocked exhaustingly through the terrific clamor.