Sue was there, pallid with excitement, and Tip Elder, who had come over for a much-needed holiday, and Walter Carter, who had been on an errand to Germany, and who had (of all unexpected people!) convinced Madam Bradley that her own hard pride should no longer be forced to regulate her children's enmities, and come to extend the olive-branch to Roger. I was as nervous as could be and Roger, I think, was not quite so calm as he seemed and gnawed his lower lip steadily. But Margarita, one would suppose, had not only no nerves but not even any self-consciousness. She told us afterward that before the curtain rose she was nearly paralysed with terror and was convinced that her voice had gone--it caught in her throat. She could not remember the words of the _Jewel Song_ and her stomach grew icy cold--if Roger had been there, she said, she would have begged him to take her away and hide her on the Island! But he was not there. No one was there but Madame and her maid, and she could not run away alone. When she sat spinning at her wheel behind the layers of gauze, and _Faust_ saw her in his dream, her legs shook so that she could not work the treadle. But when she paced slowly onto the scene in her grey gown all worked with tiny, nearly invisible little butterflies--they had made her put aside the big ones--she was as calm and composed as the chorus around her and her voice was as beautiful as I have ever heard it. "The child was born for the stage, there is no doubt!" Sue whispered to me excitedly, and I nodded hastily, not wishing to lose a note or a movement. It was her best-known part and she was very lovely and magnetic in it, but I do not think it really suited her so well as the Wagner dramas would have, later. It is with _Marguerite_ as a great English comedienne expressed it to me some years later, of _Juliet_: one must be forty to play it properly--and then one is too old to play it properly! But what a gait she had! Her stride just fitted the stage, her carriage of neck and head was such as great artists have worked years to attain--and she was unconscious of it. Her eyes looked sky-blue under the blonde wig, and the blonde tints were lovely, if not so fascinatingly surprising as her own. When she stopped, fixed her great eyes upon _Faust_ reproachfully and sang, like a sweet, truthful child, _Non, monsieur, je ne suis belle! Ni belle, ni demoiselle...._ a little sigh of pleasure ran through the audience: she won them then and there. It seemed incredible that she was acting--it seemed that she must be real and that the others were trying to surround her with the reality she expected, as best they could. She had the sweet purity of tone--the candour, if I may so call it, often associated with delicate, small voices and singers of cool, rather inexpressive temperaments. But _Bruenhilde_ was the part for her, and _Bruenhilde_ was not cool and anything but inexpressive.