She extinguished the lights and took a place at my side. All at once the theatre, for such I must call it, was flooded with light and before my astounded eyes I beheld a vast rippling of waters, while the air was filled with the opening bars. Across the glistening green seas under the blue dome a ship grew out of the horizon and bore down upon us with colored sails bellying above the glistening of iron and bronze upon the decks. The prelude closed and with a sudden shift, I found myself literally on the deck, so complete was the illusion presented. The figures appeared not only in their natural size and color, but in three dimensions so that I could not repress an exclamation of astonishment, so life like was the corporeal illusion. The orchestra was hidden and reinforced by new varieties of wind and string instruments that were exceedingly pleasant to the ear. The stage, needless to say, had disappeared. Above us was the cloud-swept sky, about us the grey-blue splash of waves. We were within twenty feet of the principal actors, who for all purposes of illusion, might have been bodily in the room. Though only an amateur in my love of music, I perceived at once certain agreeable innovations. The stilted dramatic action had been replaced by a naturalness of movement which nevertheless harmonized with the melodic rhythm. The music, likewise, due no doubt to our proximity, was no longer delivered with the need of filling a vast auditorium, but phrased with a delicacy that revealed a hundred new shades. As for the performance of the celebrated Dianne, I cannot express my admiration. Isolde in her hands was no longer a stalking classical puppet of conventionality, a thinly disguised sophisticate, but a tempestuous, savage nature, barbaric and impulsive as a wild animal. She was strangely slender and youthful and eschewing the traditional flaxen wig, had the blue-black hair and the clear azure eyes of the dark Scandinavian, eyes which suggested now the mysteries of black caverns, now the leap of free seas. To my imagination at least, the impersonation, cleared of all artificiality, transported me back with an utter absence of criticism into the elemental, even brutal passions of a barbaric race. I had never seen anything more entrancing than the lithe grace of her feline movements, nor listened with more troubled ecstasy to the thrill of her warm, full-throated notes. Whether art or nature, she was the woman of a forgotten age that never knew the sophisticated mincings of our modern coquettes, but were swept into turbulent, even tragic passions by elemental emotions. At the first glance of her startled eyes I fell hopelessly, headlong in love, love at first sight, as sudden, as poignant as though I had received the blow between my eyes.