In the lives of professionals, whatever their profession may be, the
ordinary work of the day makes very little impression on the memory,
whereas a very strong and lasting one is often made by circumstances
which a man of leisure or a woman of the world might barely notice,
and would soon forget. In Margaret's life there were but two sorts of
days, those on which she was to sing and those on which she was at
liberty. In the one case she had a cutlet at five o'clock, and supper
when she came home; in the other, she dined like other people and went
to bed early. At the end of a season in New York, the evenings on
which she had sung all seemed to have been exactly alike; the people
had always applauded at the same places, she had always been called
out about the same number of times, she had always felt very much
the same pleasure and satisfaction, and she had invariably eaten her
supper with the same appetite. Actors lead far more emotional lives
than singers, partly because they have the excitement of a new piece
much more often, with the tremendous nervous strain of a first night,
and largely because they are not obliged to keep themselves in such
perfect training. To an actor a cold, an indigestion, or a headache
is doubtless an annoyance; but to a leading singer such an accident
almost always means the impossibility of appearing at all, with
serious loss of money to the artist, and grave disappointment to the
public. The result of all this is that singers, as a rule, are much
more normal, healthy, and well-balanced people than other musicians,
or than actors. Moreover they generally have very strong bodies and
constitutions to begin with, and when they have not they break down
young.

Paul Griggs had an old traveller's preference for having plenty of