“Practice! An hour and a half a day. That is the most you can do with your voice. But there must be hours of silent study. No matter what one may say of Geraldine Farrar now, she was, is and will remain a very great artist. It does not drop on one like the gentle rain from Heaven, after a few years of hour-and-a-half practice. That girl worked ten hours a day in her years of study. Lilli Lehmann said she never had such a worker. You have the voice—yes. Now you require solfège, through harmony and counterpoint, French, Italian and German complete, other languages to pronounce—you are but at the threshold of your toil. Oh, when I see you before me, with practically everything to learn, the days don’t seem long enough—the years don’t seem long enough!” He quieted down and looked at her. A great deal had descended upon her at once, but she felt no sense of oppression at the program outlined; rather, she felt as if energy were pouring in upon her, energy to accomplish anything he said. She rose, inhaling a long breath as she did to sing on, feeling her ribs swell out, with the sense of power that it never failed to give her. “It’s true, Pa—I did come in here half with the idea of leaving you. I didn’t know what I would do. But you have decided me. There’s no need of my thinking over what you said. I’ve decided now. You never told me all this before, about how I would have to work, because I wasn’t ready for it—isn’t that so? I am now—and thank you.” His eyes glinted beneath his brows. “I’ll not let you decide here. Go away as I told you, and then come back. At Jerry’s, your atmosphere will not be so—musical, and you can make an unbiased decision.” “No—I want to decide now—before I go back to Jerry’s——” “You speak as if Jerry might influence you the other way. Jerry loves to mind her business with strict impartiality, but if she ever overstepped her limits she would only urge you to strive as she might have. That girl has the makings of a diseuse of the first water.” She left the studio in the gilded bubble of youth’s ambition. All the voices and urges within her seemed this morning to have crystallized themselves into one refrain: “_No work is too hard if it reaches towards perfection!_” How could she have thought she could leave Pa? She had forgotten—Jerry, Jerry, the mystery—about whom Pa seemed to know more than she, Joy, who lived with her. What could she do? What was she to think? Where could she turn, in this perplexity? Jerry was sitting in her room—a pale, seedy-looking Jerry in the familiar purple kimono, staring dully at the half-packed trunk. She did not turn as Joy came in. “So you’ve—decided to go,” she said in a funny, hard little voice that wavered at the end. All the resentment and doubt that had been torturing Joy, was dispelled by the sight of that desolate figure and those few wry little words. “Jerry!” she cried. “I—I thought about it this morning—but I—I couldn’t!”