My mother was with me behind the scenes; and my grandmother was in front to see me in all my stage grandeur. I am afraid I did not care particularly where either of them were. Certainly I had no thought for anyone who might be seated out in the Great Beyond on the far side of the footlights. I sang the second act in a dream, unconscious of any audience:--hardly conscious of the music or of myself--going through it all mechanically. But the sub-conscious mind had been at work all the time. As I was changing my costume after the second act, my mother said to me: "I cannot find your grandmother anywhere. I have been looking and peeping through the hole in the curtain and from the wings, but I cannot seem to discover where she is sitting." Hardly thinking of the words, I answered at once: "She is over there to the left, about three rows back, near a pillar." The criticisms of the press next day said that my most marked specialty was my ability to strike a tone with energy. I liked better, however, one kindly reviewer who observed that my voice was "cordial to the heart!" The newspapers found my stage appearance peculiar. There was about it "a marked development of the intellectual at the expense of the physical to which her New England birth may afford a key." The man who wrote this was quite correct. He had discovered the Puritan maid behind the stage trappings of Gilda. If omens count for anything I ought to have had a disastrous first season, for everything went wrong during that opening week. I lost a bracelet of which I was particularly fond; I fell over a stick in making an entrance and nearly went on my head; and at the end of the third act of the second performance of _Rigoletto_ the curtain failed to come down, and I was obliged to stay in a crouching attitude until it could be put into working order again. But these trying experiences were not auguries of failure or of disaster. In fact my public grew steadily kinder to me, although it hung back a little until after Marguerite. Audiences were not very cordial to new singers. They distrusted their own judgment; and I don't altogether wonder that they did.