By this means she keeps her admirers at beck and call, and they all agree that she is “as clever as she knows how”—what odious expressions they do use nowadays!—but that “you have to mind your P’s and Q’s with her,” for she puts out her bristles of propriety at the least alarm. Still they do not propose marriage, and that is a subject of perennial annoyance to her. But perhaps Madame Brown-Smith may be in some measure accountable for this lapse of connubial courtesy on the part of Miss Diatone’s admirers. To tell the truth, she has an unmistakable way of intimating that any one who married Euterpe would find to his cost that mother and daughter were inseparable; though I cannot help thinking, from my personal observation of the young vocalist herself, that after marriage she would take an entirely different view of the matter from her mother. In the meanwhile, she realises with undisguised irritation that this mother of hers is spoiling all her matrimonial chances in her enthusiastic endeavours to further her daughter’s professional interests, and perhaps, in a greater degree, her own comforts. It must not be supposed that Euterpe is not fond of her mother, or that she does not pay her sufficient attention; but she has acquired a habit of egotism, perhaps from the practice of constantly standing alone upon the platform, and facing the public on her own merits. When, therefore, Madame Brown-Smith’s idea of her own importance increases with her daughter’s professional and social status, and she monopolises the conversation with “_my_ daughter” this, and “_my_ daughter” that, and “_my_ daughter” the other, Euterpe feels that she could create so much more favourable an impression concerning her own doings with the personal persuasion of her “I.” As the Americans would say, she wants “to run her own show.” And what concert-agent, what composer, what publisher, or even what conscientious critic, would not be more inclined to listen favourably to the autobiographical details of a fair and winning egotist, with all her charm of personality, than to the obvious advertising and touting of the young artist’s aggressive mother? If Miss Euterpe Diatone makes herself amiable to us with an eye to business—knowing us to be in a position to assist her professionally, we amiably fall in with her views because, though one eye be to business, the other is to ourselves, and both are pretty. We are only men, after all. But with the mother, it is quite another thing. We respect her maternal solicitude and her business assiduity, but she is a bore—brutal though it sound to say so. Moreover, without her for show-woman I verily believe Euterpe Diatone would have been a truer artist and a nicer woman. _THE “DEAREST FRIEND”_