The Dagger and the Man

Rosetta Rosa and I threaded through the crowd towards the Embankment
entrance of the Gold Rooms. She had spoken for a few moments with
Emmeline, who went pale with satisfaction at the candid friendliness
of her tone, and she had chatted quite gaily with Sullivan himself;
and we had all been tremendously impressed by her beauty and fine
grace--I certainly not the least. And then she had asked me, with a
quality of mysteriousness in her voice, to see her to her carriage.

And, with her arm in mine, it was impossible for me to believe that
she could influence, in any evil way, my future career. That she might
be the cause of danger to my life seemed ridiculous. She was the
incarnation of kindliness and simplicity. She had nothing about her of
the sinister, and further, with all her transcendent beauty and charm,
she was also the incarnation of the matter-of-fact. I am obliged 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 rôle--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 which I
had just passed with Emmeline; and I was disposed, if not to laugh at
the whole thing, at any rate to regard it calmly, dispassionately, as
one of the various inexplicable matters with which one meets in a
world absurdly called prosaic. I was sure that no trick had been
played upon me. I was sure that I had actually seen in the crystal
what I had described to Emmeline, and that she, too, had seen it. But
then, I argued, such an experience might be the result of hypnotic
suggestion, or of thought transference, or of some other imperfectly
understood agency.... Rosetta Rosa an instrument of misfortune! No!