"I know what you think in your heart. I'm a vaudeville product with a grand-opera aspiration." "I'm not capable of judging." "You judged your sister." "Ah, but Millie's voice there was no mistaking. Her talent needed hardly to be developed. It opened naturally, like a rose. Nine voices out of ten have to be drilled for like precious ore. Just you study on. I'll have Auchinloss hear you when he comes over." "You're sure, Miss Neugass, they're coming?" "That's what the papers keep saying. She's to sing three operas in January, with Auchinloss conducting. We're expecting daily to hear from my sister, verifying it." "You don't know--exactly?" "No." "If only--You don't think it will be this side of January? You see, after January my--my plans may be uncertain." "I understand. He's to conduct his own symphony in December, to be played the first time in this country, somewhere around Christmas in Boston, I think." "Will you be wanting this room then?" Miss Neugass swung her face with its considerable dip of nose toward Lilly. "You don't think this place will hold Millie any more? You don't think, for instance, the great Du Gass could receive the reporters--here!" "But, after all, it's her home." A levelness of expression came down over the face of Miss Neugass, as if a shade had been lowered across it, her voice, too, leveled of any inflection. "Of course," she said, "you know about my sister and--Auchinloss." "You mean--" "Oh, I realize everybody knows--that is, everybody except my parents." "I didn't--" "That's because you don't belong yet! Wait until you've worked your way in a bit. I've known it long enough. Two years." "Then she--you--" "She was a baby when she left, Miss Parlow. Even if there had been the money to send me along with her, we wouldn't have felt the need of it. I could have staked my life on that child. Not that I'm blaming her, only I--God! I could have staked my life." "He's--" "Already married. She wrote me the whole story two years ago. It's an old one. So old it's got barnacles. I sometimes wonder it came to me with the terrible shock it did. She was so young--too young to get ahead so quickly even with her gifts. He has a son almost her age. He's forty and she's twenty. The wife in an insane asylum somewhere outside of Paris. Our Millie! I don't think I even realize it yet. Beauty and the Beast they call them in Milan." "Horrible!" "That baby. The whole world before her. It was all with her or nothing, she wrote, and she chose all. She sang six leading roles that first year. It made her. I--I don't blame her, somehow--that baby. It's him I hate. Sometimes I wonder how I'm going to hold back, when I lay hands on him, from--killing. But I won't. I'll grin and bear it just as if her beautiful little white self were no more to me than an alabaster vase after it's cracked." "And your parents?"