Miss Diatone lives in the midst of this narrow world, with its warped personal interests and its jealousies, so opposed to the great world of art, which concerns itself with all humanity, but somehow she does not appear to realise that it is so. It has not yet been borne in upon her that the professionally musical community is not the centre of the universe, and that she is not the actual axis on which it turns. If such a knowledge were likely to come to her from any quarter, her mother would be in time to prevent it, for Madame Brown-Smith is her daughter’s Barnum. By the way, why she is called “Madame” Brown-Smith is a mystery, unless she considers that her daughter’s _status_ in the musical profession confers that distinction upon her as a right. There is often a good deal of mystification among musical artists on the subject of these prefixes. They would seem to regard the use of “Madame” as a sort of artistic degree, and many vocalists’ mothers, adopting it in place of plain “Mrs.,” appear to hold the title in trust for their daughters till they become too old to be styled “Miss” any longer. Without any disrespect to mothers, for as a class I reverence them, I cannot help thinking how much pleasanter many vocalists I wot of would be if they had no mothers, or, rather, if they had not the mothers Providence has provided them withal. Now, Miss Euterpe Diatone would be quite a nice, companionable girl if it were not for that mother of hers. Of course, Diatone is only a pseudonym, adopted for professional purposes, but as Euterpe Brown-Smith—when her father was alive, and before her mother discovered that she was worth working as a means of income—she was unaffected, and quite popular among her school-friends, though somewhat inclining to personal vanity. Then she began to develop a singing voice of a quality beyond anything known in their social circle—Mr. Brown-Smith, by the way, travelled in something or other, and they lived at Peckham Rye—and the fullest musical resources of the local High School were called into requisition for the cultivation of her voice. Then she was sent to one of the academies of music, and became quite popular in the parlours of Peckham Rye and its vicinity. She was greatly in demand for penny readings, choral meetings, and social gatherings of all kinds; and, of course, with her went her mother, who shone with her accomplished daughter’s reflected light, posed as the mother of the local _prima donna_, and made social capital out of the position.