positively cadaverous. She herself said that her appearance had been
the result of living many years with the celebrated Madame Bonanni,
who was a whirlwind, an earthquake, a phenomenon, a cosmic force. No
one who had lived with her in her stage days had ever grown fat; it
was as much as a very strong constitution could do not to grow thin.

Madame Bonanni had presented the cadaverous woman to the young
Primadonna as one of the most precious of her possessions, and out of
sheer affection. It was true that since the great singer had closed
her long career and had retired to live in the country, in Provence,
she dressed with such simplicity as made it possible for her to exist
without the long-faithful, all-skilful, and iron-handed Alphonsine;
and the maid, on her side, was so thoroughly a professional theatrical
dresser that she must have died of inanition in what she would have
called private life. Lastly, she had heard that Madame Bonanni had now
given up the semblance, long far from empty, but certainly vain, of a
waist, and dressed herself in a garment resembling a priest's cassock,
buttoned in front from her throat to her toes.

Alphonsine locked the door, and the Primadonna leaned her elbows on
the sordid toilet-table and stared at her chalked and painted face,
vaguely trying to recognise the features of Margaret Donne, the
daughter of the quiet Oxford scholar, her real self as she had been
two years ago, and by no means very different from her everyday self
now. But it was not easy. Margaret was there, no doubt, behind the
paint and the 'liquid white,' but the reality was what the public
saw beyond the footlights two or three times a week during the opera
season, and applauded with might and main as the most successful lyric
soprano of the day.