“Years passed. In my desperation, I let some things slide. They had said I did too much, drank too much, stayed up too late, ate too little—so I changed. Sacrifices had to be made.”

The light faded from brightly artificial to dim daylight. The population of her salon dwindled as the mass of cultured urbanites departed gradually, gracefully, and permanently. A smaller household staff remained to tend to her as she brooded on her chaise, and the shift in light made her clothes look dowdier and her figure less trim.

She sprang up from the chaise with unexpected energy and walked toward the audience as a frenzy of scene-changing commenced behind her. The chaise was bundled out and a crib trundled in. Her husband came to stand beside it, smiling proudly as the chorus gathered and cooed around the new arrival under the crib’s blankets.

Standing in front of the domestic tableau, stationed at the edge of the action, the woman took up the narration once more from her unseen avatar. “At last, in time, I was rewarded for my self-restraint. I provided my husband with a child to carry on his line. The congratulations bore an inappropriate amount of relief, but I took them without complaint.”

The chorus moved again, drawing slowly away from the center of the stage until the last admiring well-wisher was left to wave with shy fondness from the very fringes of the spotlight.

“But there were some . . . doubts.” There was bitter emphasis in the woman’s words as the last person turned away and her husband abruptly let fall the mask of paternal satisfaction to frown in perplexity at the crib, caught somewhere between vexation and pity.

A lone clarinet warbled a forlorn melodic line as she paused and looked back over her shoulder at the tableau, displaying her own vexation and regret for a moment before facing forward once more to continue the tale.

“In time I learned the truth. Many years before, doctors had said that my husband would never father children. The family had kept it quiet for political as well as personal reasons, and that silence only encouraged my husband’s denial. After all, people have certain expectations of a king. My child was to me a surprise and a pleasure but to him a surprise and a problem. I thought I could solve it. I did and said everything I could to reassure him, to convince him of the miracle.”