Is there any
trade or profession whose practitioners, in the bottom
of their hearts, do not think they are living excusably
and perhaps creditably? The Jennings theory was that
he was a great teacher; that there were only a very few
serious and worth-while seekers of the singing art;
that in order to live and to teach these few, he had to
receive the others; that, anyhow, singing was a fine
art for anyone to have and taking singing lessons made
the worst voice a little less bad--or, at the least, singing
was splendid for the health. One of his favorite
dicta was, ``Every child should be taught singing--
for its health, if for nothing else.'' And perhaps he
was right! At any rate, he made his forty to fifty
thousand a year--and on days when he had a succession
of the noisy, tuneless squawkers, he felt that he
more than earned every cent of it.
Mildred did not penetrate far into the secret of the
money-making branch of the Jennings method. It was
crude enough, too. But are not all the frauds that
fool the human race crude? Human beings both cannot
and will not look beneath surfaces.
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