Roger and he had what must be confessed was a quarrel (though the newspaper accounts of a duel were, of course, absurd) over the advisability of her singing privately for a young German princeling whom Seidl was very anxious to honour--he was then introducing the Wagnerian dramas into America and had not been long director of the Metropolitan Opera House, New York. It all smoothed over and we agreed to forget it, all of us, but Seidl's pride was hurt and Roger had done what I had not seen him do for fifteen years--lost his temper badly. He was not pleasant in a temper, old Roger, like all men of strong, controlled natures, and Margarita learned a lesson that day that she never forgot, I suppose. I believe if on the strength of that impression he had carried her off bodily--flung her over his saddle-bow, as it were, and ceased to respect her rights for twenty-four hours, we should all have been spared much strain and suffering. But he regretted his violence and told her so, which was fatal, or so it seemed to me. There are occasions when not to take advantage of a woman is to be unfair to her, and Margarita was very much a woman. Well, well, it's all over now, and we have no need to regret that we did not try a different way. It may be we should have had to pay a greater price--for nothing lacks its price-mark on life's counter, more's the pity, and if we are deceived by long credit-accounts, the more fools we! CHAPTER XXVIII ARABIAN NIGHTS IN ENGLAND I had much to reconstruct that season in regard to Margarita. I had found her once before, in Paris, no longer a child, but a woman; I found her now no woman merely, but a woman of the world. It seems incredible, indeed, and I have puzzled over it many an hour when the demon of sciatica has clawed at my hip and Hodgson's faithful hands have dropped fatigued from his ministrations. How she did it, how an untrained, emotional little savage, with hands as quick to strike as the paws of a cub lioness, with tongue as unbridled as the tongue of a four-year-old, with no more religion than a Parisian _boulevardier_, with not one-tenth the instruction of a London board-school child--how such a creature became in two years an (apparently) finished product of civilisation, I am at a loss to comprehend. That she did it is certain. My own eyes have seen Boston Brahmins drinking her tea gratefully; my own ears have heard New York fashionables babbling in her drawing-room. As for London, she dominated one whole season, and not to be able to bow to her, when she rode on her grey gelding of a morning, was to argue oneself unbowed to! Paris can never forget her, for did she not invent an entirely new _Marguerite_? And the Republic of Art is not ungrateful. She would have been a social success in Honolulu or Lapland, the witch!