As he spoke such sentences his face would light up with malicious humour, and he was so interested in the subject he discussed that his listener was forced to follow him. It was only in such moments of artistic discussion that his real soul floated up to the surface, and he, as it were, achieved himself. He knew, too, how to play with his listener, to wheedle and beguile him, for after a particularly aggressive phrase he would drop into a minor key, and his criticism would suddenly become serious and illuminative. To him "Parsifal" was a fresco, a decoration painted by a man whose true genius it was to reveal the most intimate secrets of the soul, to tell the enigmatic soul of longing as Leonardo da Vinci had done. But he had been led from the true path of his genius into the false one of a rivalry with Veronese. Only where Wagner is confiding a soul's secret is he interesting, and in "Tannhäuser," in this first flower of his dramatic and musical genius, he had perhaps told the story of his own soul more truly, more sincerely than elsewhere. To do that was the highest art. Sooner or later the sublimest imaginations pale before the simple telling of a personal truth, for the most personal truth is likewise the most universal. "Tannhäuser" is the story of humanity, for what is the human story if it isn't the pursuit of an ideal? And this essential and primal truth Evelyn revealed to him and the very spirit and sense of maidenhood, the centre and receptacle of life, the mysterious secret of things, the awful moment when the whisper of the will to live is heard in matter, the will which there is no denying, the surrender of matter, the awaking of consciousness in things. And united to the eternal idea of generation, he perceived the congenital idea which in remotest time seems to have sprung from it--that life is sin and must be atoned for by prayer. Evelyn's interpretation revealed his deepest ideas to himself, and at last he seemed to stand at the heart of life. Suddenly his rapture was broken through; the singer had stopped the orchestra. "You have cut some of the music, I see," she said, addressing the conductor. "Only the usual cut, Miss Innes." "About twenty pages, I should think." The conductor counted them. "Eighteen." "Miss Innes, that cut has been accepted everywhere--Munich, Berlin, Wiesbaden--everywhere except Bayreuth." "But, Mr. Hermann Goetze, my agreement with you is that the operas I sing in are to be performed in their entirety." "In their entirety; that is to say, well--taken literally, I suppose--that the phrase 'In their entirety' could be held to mean without cuts; but surely, regarding this particular cut--I may say that I spoke to Sir Owen about it, and he agreed with me that it was impossible to get people into the theatre in London before half-past seven." "But, Mr. Hermann Goetze, your agreement is with me, not with Sir Owen Asher." "Quite so, Miss Innes, but--"