further, with all her transcendent beauty and charm, she was also the incarnation of the matter-of-fact. I amobliged to say this, though I fear that it may impair for some people the vision of her loveliness and her unique personality. She was the incarnation of the matter-of-fact, because she appeared to be invariably quite unconscious of the supremacy of her talents. She was not weighed down by them, as many artists of distinction are weighed down. She carried them lightly, seemingly unaware that they existed. Thus no one could have guessed that that very night she had left the stage of the Opera after an extraordinary triumph in her greatest r�le — that of Isolde in “Tristan.”

And so her presence by my side soothed away almost at once the excitation and the spiritual disturbance of the scene through