It was the same with her reading.  She had had drill enough to make her elocution passable; her voice was clear and sweet; she had a natural knack, as we have seen, for speaking to the galleries.  When there was a sensational, dramatic point to make, she could make it after her external fashion, strongly.  The deep magnetism—­the electric thrill of soul-reality—­these she had nothing to do with.

Yet she read some things that thrilled of themselves; the very words of which, uttered almost anyhow, were fit to bring men to their feet and women to tears, with sublimity and pathos.  Somebody had helped her choose effectively, and things very cunningly adaptive to herself.

The last selection for the first part of her reading to-night was Mrs. Browning’s “Court Lady.”

“Wear your fawn-colored silk when you read this,” Virginia Levering had counseled.

Her self-consciousness made the first lines telling.

  “Her hair was tawny with gold,—­her eyes with purple were dark;
   Her cheeks pale opal burned with a red and restless spark.”

Her head, bright with its golden-dusty waves and braids, leaned forward under the light as she uttered the words; her great, gray-blue eyes, deepening with excitement to black, lifted themselves and looked the crowd in the face; the color mounted like a crimson spark; she glowed all over.  Yes, over; not up, nor through; but some things catch from the outside.  A flush and rustle ran over the faces, and the benches; she felt that every eye was upon her, lit up with an admiring eagerness, that answered to her eagerness to be admired.

O, this was living!  There was a pulse and a rush in this!  Marion Kent was living, with all her nature that had yet waked up, at that bewildering and superficial moment.

But she has got to live deeper.  The Lord, who gave her life, will not let her off so.  It will come.  It is coming.

We know not the day nor the hour; though we go on as if we knew all things and were sure.

At this very instant, there is close upon you, Marion Kent, one of those lightning shafts that run continually quivering to and fro about the earth, with their net-work of fire, in this storm of life under which we of to-day are born.  All the air is tremulous with quick, converging nerves; concentrating events, bringing each soul, as it were, into a possible focus continually, under the forces that are forging to bear down upon it.  There are no delays,—­no respites of ignorance.  Right into the midst of our most careless or most selfish doing, comes the summons that arrests us in the Name of the King.

                             “She rose to her feet with a spring.
  That was a Piedmontese!  And this is the Court of the King!”

She was upon her feet, as if the impulse of the words had lifted her; she had learned by rote and practice when and how to do it; she had been poised for the action through the reading of all those last stanzas.