I used to try and suggest the peasant blood in Marguerite by little shynesses and awkwardnesses. After the first meeting with Faust I would slyly stop and glance back at him with girlish curiosity to see what he looked like. People found this "business" very pretty and convincing, but I understand that I did not give the typically Teutonic bourgeois impression as well as Federici, a German soprano who was heard in America after me. She was of the class of Gretchen, and doubtless found it easier to act like a peasant unused to having fine gentlemen speak to her, than I did. There was very little general enthusiasm before the production of _Faust_. There were so few American musicians then that no one knew nor cared about the music. Neither was the poem so well read as it was later. The public went to the opera houses to hear popular singers and familiar airs. They had not the slightest interest in a new opera from an artistic standpoint. I had never been allowed to read Goethe's poem until I began to study Marguerite. But even my careful mother was obliged to admit that I would have to familiarise myself with the character before I interpreted it. It is doubtful, even then, if I entered fully into the emotional and psychological grasp of the _rôle_. All that part of it was with me entirely mental. I could seize the complete mental possibilities of a character and work them out intelligently long before I had any emotional comprehension of them. As a case in point, when I sang Gilda I gave a perfectly logical presentation of the character, but I am very sure that I had not the least notion of what the latter part of _Rigoletto_ meant. Fear, grief, love, courage,--these were emotions that I could accept and with which I could work; but I was still too immature to have much conception of the great sex complications that underlay the opera that I sang so peacefully. And I dare say that one reason why I played Marguerite so well was because I was so ridiculously innocent myself.