Nevertheless, he recalled, the widely heralded performance had been
coolly received. Patti, although she had not perceptibly failed in
voice, had been unable to inspire the customary enthusiasm; and the
scene at the evening's end, planned to express her overwhelming triumph
and superiority, when the horses had been taken from her carriage and it
had been dragged by hand to the portal of the Windsor Hotel, had been no
better than perfunctory. The wily Mapleson had arranged that beforehand,
Howat Penny realized, with a faint, reminiscent smile on his severe
lips--the "enthusiastic mob" had been coldly recruited, at a price, from
the choristers. Another memory of Patti, and of that same performance,
flooded back--the dinner given her in the Brunswick. He saw again the
room where, on a divan, she had received her hosts, the seventy or more
men of fashion grouped in irreproachable black and white, with her suave
manager, the inevitable tea rose in his lapel, on a knee before Adelina,
kissing her hand. The dinner had been laid in the ball room, lit with a
multitude of wax candles. The features, appearance, of the more
prominent men, of Mahun Stetson and Daly and William Steinway, were
clear still. The original plan had been to include ladies at the
dinner, but the latter, affecting outrage at the Diva's affair with the
Marquis de Caux, had refused to lend their countenance to the singer's
occasion.
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