The Splendid Folly

"I don't want to have a pretty voice!" she broke out, passionately. "I wouldn't say thank you for it."

And anger having swallowed up her nervousness, she opened her mouth--and her throat with it this time?--and let out the full powers that were hidden within her nice big larynx.

When she ceased, Baroni closed the open pages of the song, and turning on his stool, regarded her for a moment in silence.

"No," he said at last, dispassionately. "It is certainly not a pree-ty voice."

To Diana's ears there was such a tone of indifference, such an air of utter finality about the brief speech, that she felt she would have been eternally grateful now could she only have passed the low standard demanded by the possession of even a merely "pretty" voice.

"So this is the voice you bring me to cultivate?" continued the maestro. "This that sounds like the rumblings of a subterranean ea