She was certainly not a child; she was not even a very young girl, at twenty-four; she had never been prudish, and she did not affect the pre-Serpentine innocence of Eve before the fall.

Yet it was suddenly apparent to her that because she was a singer men treated her as if she were a married woman, and would have done so if she had been even five years younger.

Talking to her as Margaret Donne, in Mrs.
Rushmore's house, two years earlier, Logotheti would not have approached such a subject as little Ida Moon's possible relation to Mr.Van Torp, because the Greek had been partly brought up in England and had been taught what one might and might not say to a 'nice English girl.' Margaret now reflected that since the day she had set foot upon the stage of the Opera she had apparently ceased to be a 'nice English girl' in the eyes of men of the world.

The profession of singing in public, then, presupposed that the singer was no longer the more or less imaginary young girl, the hothouse flower of the social garden, whose perfect bloom the merest breath of worldly knowledge must blight for ever.

Margaret might smile at the myth, but she could not ignore the fact that she was already as much detached from it in men's eyes as if she had entered the married state.