I have spoken of how hopeless it is for an opera singer to try to work emotionally or purely on impulse; of how futile the merely temperamental artist becomes on the operatic stage. Yet too much stress cannot be laid on the importance of feeling what one does and sings. It is in just this seeming paradox that the truly professional artist's point of view may be found. The amateur acts and sings temperamentally. The trained student gives a finished and correct performance. It is only a genius--or something very near it--who can do both. There is something balanced and restrained in a genuine _prima donna's_ brain that keeps her emotions from running away with her, just as there is at the same time something equally warm and inspired in her heart that animates the most clear-cut of her intellectual work and makes it living and lovely. Sometimes it is difficult for an experienced artist to say just where instinct stops and art begins. When I sang Amina I was greatly complimented on my walk and my intonation, both most characteristic of a somnambulist. I made a point of keeping a strange, rhythmical, dreamy step like that of a sleep-walker and sang as if I were talking in my sleep. I breathed in a hard, laboured way, and walked with the headlong yet dragging gait of someone who neither sees, knows, nor cares where she is going. Now, this effect came not entirely from calculation nor yet from intuition, but from a combination of the two. I was in the _mood_ of somnambulism and acted accordingly. But I deliberately placed myself in that mood. This only partly expresses what I wish to say on the subject; but it is the root of dramatic work as I know it.