"More of us starve than the world suspects," he answered. "It is the privilege of genius. This is a planet, my dear child, where mediocrity is exalted and genius brought low. It is a living fulfilment of the scriptural prophecy, 'The first shall be last and the last shall be first.'" Then he added: "Sing again." Mariana stood up and sang. His words had depressed her, and her voice trembled. She looked at him wistfully, her hands hanging at her sides, her head thrown back. It was an aria from "Faust." He shook his head slowly. "You will never be great," he said. "I can give you technique, but not volume. Your voice will never be great." With a half-defiant gesture Mariana broke forth again. This time it was a popular song, with a quick refrain running through it. As she sang she acted the accompaniment half unconsciously. Signor Morani frowned as she commenced, and then watched her attentively. In the fragile little girl, with the changeable eyes of green and the aureole of shadowless hair, he scented possibilities. "Your voice will never be great," he repeated; "but you may make men believe so." "And you will take me?" pleaded Mariana. She stretched out her beautiful hands. Her eyes prayed. Her flexible tones drooped. Signor Morani took her hands in his with kindly reassurance. "Yes," he said--"yes; it will keep you out of mischief, at least." And it had kept her out of mischief. It had opened a channel for her emotions. Like a tide, the romanticism of her nature veered towards art. She became the most fanatical of devotees. She breathed it and lived it. In her heart it transplanted all other religions, and the aestheticism of its expression gained a marvellous hold upon her faith. Above the little mosaic altar at her bedside she enshrined a bust of Wagner, and she worshipped it as some more orthodox believer had once worshipped an enshrined Madonna. At midnight she held devotional services all alone, sitting before the piano, bending to the uses of a litany the intellectual rhapsodies of Beethoven or the sensuous repinings of Chopin, while the little red flame sent up praise and incense from dried rose leaves and cinnamon to the memories of dead musicians. She introduced a rare, sensuous beauty into this new worship, as she had introduced it into the old. She typified the Church when, in its fresh young passion, and suffused with the dying splendors of paganism, it turned from the primitive exercises of its founders and revived the worship of the gracious Madonna of Old Egypt in the worship of the Madonna of Nazareth, and the flower-scented feasts of Venus in the Purification of the Virgin. There existed in the girl an unsatisfied restlessness of self, resulting in the desire for complete submergence of soul in idea. Her nature veered constantly from extreme to extreme; there was no semblance of a saner medium, and as a system must have exponents, the high priests and priestesses of art became her lesser divinities.