The Jennings
singing lesson, at fifteen dollars a half-hour, was
rather an expensive hypocrisy; but the women who
used it as a cloak for idleness as utter as the mere
yawners and bridgers and shoppers had rich husbands
or fathers.
Thus it appears that the Jennings School was a perfect
microcosm, as the scientists would say, of the human
race--the serious very few, toiling more or less
successfully toward a definite goal; the many, compelled to
do something, and imagining themselves serious and
purposeful as they toiled along toward nothing in par-
ticular but the next lesson--that is, the next day's
appointed task; the utterly idle, fancying themselves
busy and important when in truth they were simply a
fraud and an expense.
Jennings got very little from the deeply and
genuinely serious. One of them he taught free, taking
promissory notes for the lessons. But he held on to
them because when they finally did teach themselves
to sing and arrived at fame, his would be part of the
glory--and glory meant more and more pupils of
the paying kinds.
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