XVIII GEESE AND GUESTS 199 XIX RUSSIANS, COMMON AND PREFERRED 206 XX THE GRANDMOTHERS' BALLET 220 XXI STAGE FASHIONS AND THE GLORY OF COLOUR 230 XXII ROYAL HUMOUR 242 XXIII COVENT GARDEN AND--AMERICA 257 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Kathleen Howard _Frontispiece_ I Carmen as I Used to Dress It 76 II Carmen as I Now Dress It 84 I Amneris as I Used to Dress It 126 II Amneris as I Now Dress It 134 I Dalila as I Used to Dress It 172 II Dalila as I Now Dress It 180 Caruso's Caricature of Kathleen Howard 260 CHAPTER I THE WAY IT ALL HAPPENED I was very young and I was engaged to be married. We had just lost our money in rather dramatic fashion, and we were all doing what we could to supply the sudden deficit. My sister began to prepare herself to be a teacher, my brother left his boarding school and came home to go into a friend's office, and I--well, I accepted the hand and heart of the young man in our set with whom I had had most pleasure in dancing in winter and sailing in summer. My heart didn't lose a beat and turn over when I saw him coming as did those of the heroines in Marion Crawford's novels, but we were the best friends in the world, and I thought that anything else must be a literary exaggeration, put in to make the story more exciting; just as the heroine's eyelashes were usually exaggerated to the abnormal length of an inch to make her more beautiful, though none of the girls I knew had them like that. He was a young business man, just starting as assistant to his father whose business was an old established, comfortable sort of family affair, big enough to supply, in time, an extra income for an unambitious young couple like ourselves. Every one congratulated us heartily, and I began to embroider towels and hem table napkins and to dream about patterns of flat silver. The whole arrangement was satisfactory to the point of banality, and I might be quite an old married woman by this time, but--I had a voice. Nine-tenths of me, at this age, were the normal, rational characteristics of a well-brought up, bright, good looking girl. But the last tenth was an unknown quantity, a great big powerful something which I vaguely felt, even then, to be the master of all the other tenths, a force which was capable of having its own way with the rest of me if I should ever give it a chance. My voice, the agent of this vague power, had developed rather late. It is true that our whole childhood had been coloured by music, that we read notes before we could read letters, and that music was our earliest and most natural mode of expression.