"My poor child, you must have presence and personality; good teeth and a knowledge of how to dress; grace of manner, dramatic feeling, high intelligence, and an aptitude for foreign languages besides a great many other essentials that are too numerous to mention but that you will discover fast enough if you try to go ahead without them!"
An impulsive and warm-hearted friend was visiting me once when I received a letter from a young woman whom I will call "E. H.," asking permission to come and sing for me. I read the note in despair and threw it over to my friend.
"What are you going to do about it?" she asked, after she had glanced through it.
"How do you know that?" protested my friend.
"By her letter. It is a crassly ignorant letter. I feel perfectly sure that she can't sing."
"You are very unkind!" my friend reproached me. "You ought at least to hear her. You may be discouraging a genuine genius----"
"Now see here," I interrupted, "'E. H.' is evidently ignorant and uneducated. She further admits that she is poor. These facts taken together make a terrible handicap. She'd have to be a miracle to make good in spite of them."
"I will pay her expenses to come here and see you," declared my dear friend, obstinate in well-doing, like many another mistaken philanthropist.
I told her that she might take that responsibility if she liked, but that I would have nothing to do with raising a girl's false hopes in any such way. "It's a little hard on her," I said, "to have to borrow money to take a journey simply to be told that she can't sing. However, have it your own way and bring her."
She came. I saw her approaching up the driveway and simply pointed her out to my misguided friend. Anyone would have known the minute he saw "E. H." that she could not sing. She slouched and dragged her feet and was hopelessly ordinary, every inch of her. It was not merely a matter of plainness, but something far worse. She was quite hopeless. It turned out, poor soul, that she was a chambermaid in a hotel. People had heard her singing at her work and had told her that she ought to have her voice cultivated. It was, as usual, a case of injudicious friends, and, by the way, the very fact of being carried away by such praise is in itself a mark of a certain lack of intelligence. This girl had no temperament, no ear, no equipment, no taste, no advantages in the way of having heard music. I had to say to her: