Can you honestly say she hasn't chosen the better part ?" Baroni was silent.
"Don't grudge her a year or two of freedom," pursued Max.

"You know, you old slave-driver, you,"-- laughing--"that it is only because you want her for your beloved Art--because you want her voice! Otherwise you would rejoice in her happiness." "And you--what is it you want ?" retorted Baroni, unappeased.

"You want her soul! Whereas I would give her soul wings that she might send it singing forth into an enraptured world." But Baroni's words fell upon stony ground, and Max and Diana went their way, absorbed in one another and in the wonderful happiness which love had brought them.
Thus spring slipped away into summer, and the season was in full swing when fate tossed the first pebble into their unruffled pool of joy.
It was only a brief paragraph, sandwiched in between the musical notes of a morning paper, to which Olga Lermontof, who came daily to Lilac Lodge to practise with Diana, drew the latter's attention.

The paragraph recalled the fact that it was just a year since Miss Quentin had made her debut, and then went on to comment lightly upon the brief and meteoric character of her professional appearances.
"Domesticity should not have claimed Miss Quentin"-- so ran the actual words.

"Hers was a voice the like of which we may not hear again, and the public grudges its withdrawal.