Styr and her management had been careful to give the antidote of Elsa and Elizabeth often enough to protect an exhilarated public against reaction; and by one of those curious paradoxes, known to all that have had reason to study the public taste, her portrayal of that princess among virgins, Elizabeth of Thüringen, from her joyous girlhood to that last mournful scene where she is both saint and woman and wholly lovely, was quite as popular as of those passionate and lawless heroines, Isolde and Sieglinde.

In Munich Styr had sung the part of Venus as a matter of course, leaving the more lyric r?le to the aspiring jugendlichdramatischen, but she, as well as her directors, well knew that to give Tannh?user the mounting and accessories which made the first scene of its first act, as represented in Munich, the most suggestive on the stage, would be going a step too far even with the British public in its present state of enthusiasm. And without that rosy atmosphere like the mist of an amorous dawn, that sumptuous yet mirage-like couch in the background, the refined yet lascivious dancing of satyrs and nymphs, the visions of Leda and the swan, Europa and the bull, that first long scene, despite its delicious music, would mean to the unmusical beholder naught but an interminable duet between a forward woman in a Greek fillet and baggy gown, and a sulky man in a leathern jerkin and top-boots. Therefore was the first scene cut down to little more than a prologue, the part of Venus sung by an obese German beyond her prime, and fashion entered boxes and stalls a few moments before Elizabeth ran into the great hall of her father’s castle with a burst of song as of a bird mounting to the empyrean after long drooping behind the bars of a cage.

Perhaps Styr had never proved herself a greater actress than when she stared, incredulous and horrified, at the outbreak of the sophisticated Tannh?user, disgusted with the provincial virtues of the knights, for she looked just sixteen; and when Mabel, who had attended the first performance, saw that dawn of sorrowful womanhood in her eyes, the impotence of maiden innocence against the subtle sweets of mature vice, she clutched her salts and nearly fainted. But when in the last act, Styr, looking as only a pure woman that has never harboured so much as a sinful thought can look, first brought tears to the eyes of old cynics by her pitiful examination of every face in the ragged procession of pilgrims returning from Rome, and then, clinging to the cross, sang her soul straight up to a waiting heaven, Mabel sniffed audibly and walked out. She could not have felt more indignant had Styr publicly been received into the bosom of the Church of Rome and advertised as a beacon light for mankind. But mental suffering had developed a species of saturnine humour in her, and when she was in bed she laughed consumedly at the fool this great actress was making of London.

Before the end of the brief season Elizabeth had won in a race long disputed, perhaps ............