Not only that. My brain would have developed much more rapidly if I had been allowed--no, if I had been _obliged_ to be more self-reliant. To profit by one's own mistakes;--all the world's history goes to show that is the only way to learn. By protecting me, my mother really robbed me of much precious experience. For how many years after I had made my _début_ would she wait for me in the _coulisses_, ready to whisk me off to my dressing-room before any horrible opera singer had a chance to talk with me! Yet she grieved for my forfeited youth--did my dear mother. She always felt that I was being sacrificed to my work, and just at the time when I would have most delighted in my girlhood. Of course, I was obliged to live a life of labour and self-denial, but it was not quite so difficult for me as she felt it to be, or as other people sometimes thought it was. Not only did I adore my music, and look forward to my work as an artist, but I literally never had any other life. I knew nothing of what I had given up; and so was happy in what I had undertaken, as no girl could have been happy who had lived a less restricted, hard-working and yet dream-filled existence. My mother was very strait-laced and puritanical, as I have said, and, naturally, by reflection and association, I was the same. I lay stress on this because I want one little act of mine to be appreciated as a sign of my ineradicable girlishness and love of beauty. When I earned my first money, I went to Mme. Percival's, the smart lingerie shop of New York, and bought the three most exquisite chemises I could find, imported and trimmed with real lace! I daresay this harmless ebullition of youthful daintiness would have proved the last straw to some of my Psalm-singing New England relatives. There was one uncle of mine who vastly disapproved of my going on the stage at all, saying that it would have been much better if I had been a good, honest milliner. He used to sing: [Illustration: Musical notation; "Broad is the road That leads to Hell!"] in a minor key, with the true, God-fearing, nasal twang in it. How I detested that old man! And I had to bury him, too, at the last. I wonder whether I should have been able to do so if I had gone into the millinery business! CHAPTER IV A YOUTHFUL REALIST As I have said, I studied Gilda for nine months. At the end of that time I was so imbued with the part as to be thoroughly at ease. Present-day actors call this condition "getting inside the skin" of a _rôle_. I simply could not make a mistake, and could do everything connected with the characterisation with entire unconsciousness. Yet I want to add that I had little idea of what the opera really meant.