Many people in London on the following day said, “We felt in her singing that something extraordinary must be going to happen to her.” And some of them at any rate, probably spoke the exact truth.
Lady Holme herself, while she sang her second song, really felt this sensation--that it was her swan song. If once we touch perfection we feel the black everlasting curtain being drawn round us. We have done what we were meant to do and can do no more. Let the race of men continue. Our course is run out. To strive beyond the goal is to offer oneself up to the derision of the gods. In her song, Lady Holme felt that suddenly, and with great ease, she touched the perfection that it was possible for her to reach. She felt that, and she saw what she had done--in the eyes of Lady Cardington that wept, in Sir Donald’s eyes, which had become young as the eyes of Spring, and in the eyes of that poor prisoner who was the real Rupert Carey. When she sang the first refrain she knew.
“Torna in fior di giovinezza Isaotta Blanzesmano, Dice: Tutto al mondo e vano: Nell’amore ogni dolcezza.”
She understood while she sang--she had never understood before, nor could conceive why she understood now--what love had been to the world, was being, would be so long as there was a world. The sweetness of love did not merely present itself to her imagination, but penetrated her soul. And that penetration, while it carried with it and infused through her whole being a delicate radiance, that was as the radiance of light in the midst of surrounding blackness--beams of the moon in a forest--carried with it also into her heart a frightful sense of individual isolation, of having missed the figure of Truth in the jostling crowd of shams.
Fritz stood there against the wall. Yes--Fritz. And he was savagely rejoicing in the effect she was making upon the audience, because he thought, hoped, that it would lessen the triumph of the woman who was punishing him.
She had missed the figure of Truth. That was very certain. And as she sang the refrain for the last time she seemed to herself to be searching for the form that must surely be very wonderful, searching for it in the many eyes that were fixed upon her. She looked at Sir Donald: