There was a hard and cruel expression on many of the listening faces below. Singers were there, appraising; professional critics coldly judging, jaded, sated, because they had heard too much of the wonderful sounds of the world; men like Paul Lane, by temperament inclined to sneer and condemn; women who loved to be in camps and whose idea of setting an artist on high was to tear all other artists down. Battlefields! Battlefields! Mrs. Mansfield was painfully conscious that the last thing to be found in any circle of life is peace. Too often there was poison in the cup which the artist had to drink. Too often to attract the gaze of the world was to attract and concentrate many of the floating hatreds of the world. The little old house near Petersburg Place was a quiet refuge. Mrs. Searle, a kindly dragon, kept the door. Yellow-haired Fan was the fairy within. The faded curtains of orange color shut out very much that was black and horrid. And there the Kings of the East passed by. But there, also, the sea was as the blood of a dead man. "Well, what do you think of her?" Sir Hilary was speaking. He had a face like a fairly good-natured bulldog, and, like the bulldog, looked as if, once fastened on an enemy, he would not easily be detached. "I think it's a very beautiful voice and remarkably trained." "Do you? Well, now I don't think she's a patch on Dantini." The Admiral was wholly unmusical, but, having married an accomplished violinist, he was inclined to lay down the law about music. "Don't you?" "No, I don't. No lightness, no agility; too heavy." "There are holes in her voice," observed a stout musical critic standing beside him. "The middle register is all wrong." "That's it," said the Admiral, snapping his jaws. "Holes in the voice and the--the what you may call it all wrong." "I wonder what Adelaide Shiffney thinks?" said a small, dark, and shrewish-looking woman just behind them. "I must go and find out." "My wife won't have her. I'm dead certain of that," said the Admiral. "She ought to start again with De Reszke," said the musical critic, puffing out his fat cheeks and looking suddenly like a fish. "Well, I must go down. It's getting late," said Mrs. Mansfield. "It isn't a real soprano," said someone in a husky voice. "It's a forced-up mezzo." Beneath them Millie Deans was standing by Mrs. Shiffney, who was saying: "Charming! No, I haven't heard _Crepe de Chine_. I don't care much for Fournier's music. He imitates the Russians. Such a pity! Are you really going back to-morrow? Good-bye, then! Now, Rades, be amiable! Give us _Enigme_." Mr. Brett had disappeared. "No, Mr. Elliot, it's no use talking to me, not a bit of use!" Millie Deans exclaimed vehemently in the hall as Rades began _Enigme_ in his most velvety voice. "London has no taste, it has only fashions. In Paris that man is not a singer at all. He is merely a _diseur_. No one would dream of putting him in a programme with me."