Most musicians and those who enjoy listening to music, like to eat (this does not mean that people who like to eat always desire to listen to music at the same time, but nowadays one has little choice in the matter); what is more pregnant, most of them like to cook. We may include even the music critics, one of whom (Henry T. Finck) has written a book about such matters. The others eat ... and expand. James Huneker devotes sixteen pages of "The New Cosmopolis" to the "maw of the monster." And as H. L. Mencken has pointed out, "The Pilsner motive runs through the book from cover to cover." Dinners are constantly being given for the musicians and critics to meet and talk over thirteen courses with wine. You may read Mr. Krehbiel's glowing accounts of the dinner given to Adelina Patti (a dinner referred to in Joseph Hergesheimer's lyric novel, "The Three Black Pennys") on the occasion of her twenty-fifth anniversary as a singer, of the dinner to Marcella Sembrich to mark her retirement from the opera stage, and of a dinner to Teresa Carreno when she proposed a toast to her three husbands.... Go to the opera house and observe the lady singers, with their ample bosoms and their broad hips, the men with their expansive paunches ... and use your imagination. Why is it, when a singer is interviewed for a newspaper, that she invariably finds herself tired of hotel food and wants an apartment of her own, where she can cook to her stomach's content? Why are the musical journals and the Sunday supplements of the newspapers always publishing pictures of contralti with their sleeves rolled back to the elbows, their Poiret gowns (cunningly and carefully exhibited nevertheless) covered with aprons, baking bread, turning omelettes, or preparing clam broth Uncle Sam? You, my reader, have surely seen these pictures, but it has perhaps not occurred to you to conjure up a reason for them.