Karl Rusoff got up rather wearily from the piano, where he had been practising for the last three hours, stretched himself, and for a few seconds held his fingers against his eyes, as if to rest them. The afternoon was a little chilly, and he walked over to the fireplace, where he stood warming his hands. The cheerful, flickering blaze shining through his thin, long hands made the fingers look transparent, as if they were luminous and lit with a red light from within.

From the windows the dun-coloured gloom of a cloudy spring afternoon in London left the room vague and full of shadows that huddled into the corners, while the light of gas-lamps, already lit in the street outside, cast patches of yellow illumination high on the walls and on the mouldings of the ceiling. The room itself was large, lofty, and well-proportioned, and furnished with a certain costly simplicity. A few Persian rugs lay on the parquetted floor, a French writing-table stood in the window, a tall bookcase glimmering with the gilt and morocco of fine bindings occupied nearly half of the wall in which the fireplace was set, two or three large chairs formed a group with a sofa in the corner, and the Steinway grand occupied more than the area taken up by all the rest of the furniture. There, perhaps, simplicity gained its highest triumph,—the case was of rosewood designed by Marris, and the formal perfection of its lines was a thing only to be perceived by an artist. On the walls, finally, hung two or three prints, and on the mantelpiece were a couple of reproductions of Greek bronzes found at Herculaneum.

It was a room, in fact, that spoke very distinctly of an individual and flawless taste. Wherever the eye fell it lighted on something which, in its kind, was perfect; on the other hand, there was nothing the least startling or arresting, and, above all, nothing fidgetty. It was a room pre-eminently restful, where a tired mind might fall into reverie or an active mind pursue its activities without challenge or annoyance from visible objects. Pre-eminently also it was a room instinct with form; nothing there should have been otherwise.

Karl stood in front of the fireplace for some minutes, opening and shutting his hands, which were a little cramped, a little tired with the long practise they had just finished. His mind, too, was a little tired with the monotony of his work, for his three hours at the piano had been no glorious excursion into the sun-lit lands of melody, but the repetition of about twelve bars, all told, from a couple of passages out of the Waldstein Sonata which he was to play next week at the last of his four concerts in St. James’s Hall. And though perhaps not half a dozen people in that crowded hall would be able to tell the difference between the execution of those dozen bars as he played them yesterday and as he could play them now, he would not have been the pianist he was if it had been possible for him not to attempt to make them perfect, whether that took a week or a month. The need of perfection which never says “That will do” until the achievement cannot be bettered was a ruling instinct to him.

Besides, to him just now the presence of one out of those possible six auditors who might be able to tell the difference was more to him than all the rest of the ringing hall. Sometimes he almost wished he had never seen Martin,—never, at any rate, consented to give him lessons,—for in some strange way this pupil was becoming his master, and Rusoff was conscious that the lad’s personality, never so vivid as when he was at his music, was beginning to cast a sort of spell over his own. Brilliant, incisive, full of fire as his own style was, he was conscious when Martin played certain things that his own rendering, far more correct, far more finished though it might be, was elderly, even frigid, compared to the other. The glorious quality of his exuberant youth, a thing which in most artists is beginning to pale a little before they have attained to that level of technical skill which is necessary to a pianist of any claim to high excellence, was in Martin at its height and its noonday, while it really seemed sometimes to his master that he had been, perhaps in his cradle, perhaps as he bent his unwilling head over the crabbed intricacies of Demosthenes, somehow mysteriously initiated into the secrets of technique. Anyhow, that facility, that art of first mastering and then concealing difficulties which to most pianist only comes, as it had come to himself, through months and years of unremitting toil, seemed to be natural to his pupil. Martin had only got to be told what to do, and if he was in an obliging humour he did it. The difficulties of execution simply did not seem to exist for him. Immensely struck as Karl Rusoff had been with his performance last summer at Lord Yorkshire’s, he felt now that he had not then half fathomed the depth of his power, which lay pellucid like a great ocean cave full of changing lights and shadows, suffused to its depths with sunlight, and by its very clearness and brightness baffling the eye that sought to estimate its depths.

And his temperament—that one thing that can never be taught. Karl Rusoff knew he had never come across a temperament that, artistically speaking, approached it. It was, indeed, not less than perfect from that point of view, sensitive, impressionable, divinely susceptible to beauty, hating (here largely was the personal charm of it to his master), hating the second-rate, especially the skilful second-rate, with glorious intensity. At the thought Karl’s rather grim face relaxed into a smile as he remembered how Martin had sat down to the piano the other day in a sudden burst of Handel-hatred and with his ten fingers, which sounded like twenty, and a strangely unmelodious voice, which sounded like a crow and ranged from high falsetto treble to the note of kettledrums, had given a rendering of the “Hail-Stone Chorus,” so ludicrous, yet catching so unerringly the cheap tumult of that toy-storm in a teacup, that he himself had sat and laughed till his eyes were dim.

“And why,” asked Martin, dramatically, in conclusion, “did that German spend his long and abandoned life in England? Because he knew, sir, he knew that in any other country he would have been kindly but firmly put over the border. Now shall I sing you the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’?”

Besides this facility in technique, the power of perception of beauty, which in many of the finest minds requires years of delicate cultivation before it becomes at all mature or certain, was already present in Martin in apparent fulness of growth; it was already an instinct exerting and asserting itself, not through habit, but through intuition. It was so much the dominating ingredient in the composition known as Martin Challoner that almost everything else might be considered as a mere by-product. His whole will, his whole energy, was at its service. When once it called to him, as it had called to him in his adoption of the Roman faith, it seemed he had to obey and could not question. It was to him a law that he could not transgress.

But all this, the charm of which Karl Rusoff felt almost too keenly for his peace of mind, he knew to be extremely dangerous, and to him this exultant, beautiful mind was entrusted with all the responsibility that it entailed, to fashion, to train, to prune. With a true and honest modesty he recognised how menial, so to speak, his work in regard to Martin was; but this did not lessen the responsibility. He was, to rate himself at the highest, the gardener who had to bring this exquisite plant into fulness of flower, to feed, to water, to cut, and, above all, to let air and sun, the great natural influences, have their way with it. He did not believe in forced growth or in sheltered cultivation; as he had told Martin in the summer, every emotion, every pain and joy, so long as it was not sensual, was his proper food. The richer his experience was, the richer would his music be. Karl had already seen a first clear endorsement of his view in the circumstances attending Martin’s secession to the Roman Church. He himself did not know with any exactitude of detail what had passed between him and his father, but though the painfulness of that had knocked Martin completely up for a time, what he himself had foreseen had come true, and he could hardly help inwardly rejoicing at even the cruelty of Mr. Challoner’s attitude to his son, so great had been the gain to Martin artistically. He had suffered horribly, and was the better for it. Afterwards—the thing had taken place now more than two months ago—the elastic fibre of his youth had reasserted itself, and his exuberant health of body and mind had returned to their former vigour. The pain had passed, the gain remained.

Then to Karl’s reverie there came the interruption he had been expecting. A quick step sounded outside, then a noise as of a large quantity of books being dropped in the passage, a loud and hollow groan, and, after a short pause, Martin, with half a dozen volumes of music, entered, flushed, vivid in face, muddy in boots.

“I am late,” he said, “also I am sorry. But there was not a cab to be found. So I ran. I ran quicker than cabs. Oh, how hot I am!”

Karl’s face lighted up as he saw him. He himself was unmarried and rather lonely in the world till this child of his old age had come to him, who should be, so he told himself, the crown of his life’s work, and illuminate the dull world, long after he himself was dead, with the melodious torch that he had helped to light.

“Are you late?” he said. “I have only just finished practising myself. My dear child, how hot you are. Let us have tea first. And are you dining out to-night? If not, have a chop with me here, and we can work a little afterwards as well. You have not been to me for a week.”

“Yes, thanks, I should like that,” said Martin. “I have been down at Chartries, as you know, for a couple of days.”

He paused a moment, frowning at the fire.

“No; it was no good,” he said. “My father would not see me. He even opposed Helen’s coming to Uncle Rupert’s while I was there. But she came.”

“How is she?” asked Karl.

“Very well, and, what is so odd, extraordinarily happy,—happy in some steadily-shining way. Deep, broad, bright happiness, like sunlight. Now, how do you account for that? Away from Frank,—she doesn’t even write to him or hear from him,—continuing to do all that she found so intolerable under hugely aggravated conditions,—he not there,—and yet awfully happy. Not that father has changed to her at all,—he is very silent, very sad, very—well, sometimes very cross. And she feels his sadness, too,—feels it as if it were her own——“

“Ah, you have it,” said Karl; “that is why she is happy. It is what I have always told you—the fact of sympathy, whether it is with joy or pain, is what enriches and perfects; the fact of sympathy is what makes her happy. You are as happy—with the broad sunshine of happiness, even though a bitter wind whistles—when Isolde sinks lifeless by the body of Tristran as when Siegfried hears the singing of the bird.”

He paused a moment looking at the fire, then turned to Martin.

“Ah, my dear lad,” he said, “pray that you drink to the dregs any cup of sorrow or of joy that may be given you. Never shrink from pain—you will not become your best self without it. But by it and through it, and in no selfish or egoistic manner, you will fulfil yourself.”

He rose from his chair and turned on switch after switch of electric light.

“It is like this,” he said, feeling in his sudden desire for light some instinctive connection with what he was saying. “Open the doors, open the windows of your soul,—let the sun in and the wind. And this is a music-lesson,” he added, laughing. “Well I have given a good many in my life, and should be pleased to know I never gave a worse one. Now, what have you done since I saw you last?”

Martin walked quickly over to the piano with a laugh.

“Listen,” he said.

He played a few bars of very intricate phrase after the manner of the opening of a fugue. Then in the bass half the phrase was repeated, but it finished with something perfectly different, a third and a fourth or a fifth joined in, and before the “whole kennel was a-yelp” the original subject had passed through rapid gradations until it had become something totally different to what it began with, though still an incessant jabber of cognate phrases, never quite coherent, were somehow strung together and worked against each other by a miracle of ingenuity. Then the original subject was repeated with emphatic insistence, as if to call renewed attention to itself, but it was answered this time by a phrase that had nothing whatever to do with it; a third short melody totally different from anything that had gone before or was to come after ran its brief and ridiculous course, and then a perfect hodge-podge of reminiscences of all that had previously occurred, handled with extraordinary dexterity, made the brain positively reel and swim. Finally a huge bravura passage, as much decked out with ribands and lace as a fashionable woman at a party, brought this insane composition, which taxed even Martin’s fingers, to a totally unexpected close.

Karl Rusoff had listened at first with sheer uncomprehending bewilderment, unable, since indeed there was neither head nor tail nor body to it, to make anything whatever out of it, and for a moment he wondered if Martin was merely playing the fool. But as he looked at his face bent over the piano, and saw even his fingers nearly in difficulties, a sudden light struck him, and he began to smile. And before the end was reached he sat shaking in his chair with hopeless laughter.

“Ah, you wicked boy,” he said, “why even our dear Lady Sunningdale would recognise herself.”

Martin pushed his plume out of his left eye and laughed.

“That’s the joy of it,” he said. “She did recognise it. About half way through she said, ‘Why, that’s me.’ You know you told me to do that,—to take anything, the east wind, or a London fog, or a friend, and make music of it.”

“Play it once more, if you will,” said Karl, “and then to work. Not that that is no work. There is a great deal of work in that. Also I perceive with secret satisfaction that you do not find it easy to play. But the bravura is rather unkind. She is never quite like that.”

“Ah, the bravura is only her clothes,” said Martin, preparing to begin again. “She even told me which hat she had on. It is the one she describes as a covey of birds of paradise which have been out all night in a thunderstorm, sitting on a tomato-salad.”

Again Karl sat and listened to the torrent of fragments and currents of interrupted thoughts. Heard for the second time it seemed to him even a more brilliantly constructed absence of construction than before, an anomalous farrago which could only have been attained by a really scholarly and studious disregard of all rules; no one who had not the rules at his finger-tips could have broken them so accurately. It was a gorgeous parody of musical grammar in exactly the mode in which Lady Sunningdale’s conversation was a brilliant parody of speech, full of disconnected wit, and lit from end to end with humour, but as jerky as the antics of a monkey, as incapable of sustained flight in any one direction as a broken-winged bird, a glorious extravagance.

Karl had left his seat and stood near the piano as the bravura passage began. This time it seemed to present no difficulty to Martin, though his unerring hands were hardly more than a brown mist over the keys. And Karl felt a sudden spasm of jealousy of his pupil as a huge cascade of tenths and octaves streamed out of Martin’s fingers.

“Yes, indeed, the bravura is not easy,” he remarked, when Martin had finished, “and I think you played it without a mistake, did you not? Is it quite easy to play tenths like that?”

Martin laughed.

“I find I’ve got not to think of anything else,” he said. “Will that do for my composition for the week?”

Karl laughed.

“Yes, very well, indeed,” he said. “It has lots of humour,—and humour in music is rather rare. But don’t cultivate it, or some day you will find yourself in the position of a man who can’t help making puns. A dismal fate. Now, let us leave it—it is admirable—and get to work. I think I told you to study the last of the Noveletten. Play it, please.”

This time, however, there was no laughter and no approbation. Karl looked rather formidable.

“It won’t do,—it won’t do at all,” he said. “You have the notes, but that is absolutely all. It is perfectly empty and dead. A pianola would do as well. What’s the matter? Can’t you read anything into it?”

Martin shrugged his shoulders.

“I know it’s all wrong,” he said. “But I can’t make anything of it. It’s stodgy.”

Karl’s eyes glared rather dangerously from behind his glasses.

“Oh, stodgy, is it?” he said, slowly. “Schumann is stodgy. That is news to me. I must try to remember that.”

Martin looked sideways at his master, but Karl’s face did not relax.

“Stodgy!” he repeated. “I know where the stodginess comes in. Ah, you are either idiotic or you have taken no trouble about it. Because you have found that the mere execution was not difficult to you, you have not troubled to get at the music. I gave you music to learn, and you have brought me back notes. Do not bring a piece to me like that again. If I give you a thing to learn, I do so for some reason. Get up, please.”

Karl paused a moment, summoning to his aid all that he knew, all he had ever learned to give cunning to his fingers and perception to his brain. Never perhaps in his life had he played with more fire, with more eagerness to put into the music all that was his to put there, and that in order to charm no crowded hall packed from floor to ceiling, but to show just one pupil the difference between playing the music and playing the notes.

Martin had left the music-stool in what may be called dignified silence and was standing by the fire; but before long Karl saw him out of the corner of an eye (he could spare him neither thought nor look) steal back towards the piano, and though he could not look directly at his face, he knew what was there,—those wide-open, black eyes, finely-chiselled nostrils, swelling and sinking with his quickened breath, mouth a little open, and the whole vivid brain that informed the face lost, absorbed.

He came to the end and sat silent.

“Is that there?” asked Martin, in a half-breathless whisper. “Is that really all there?”

Karl looked up. Martin’s face was exactly as he had known it would be. But the first mood of the artist was of humility.

“I played wrong notes,” he said. “Half a dozen at least.”

“Oh, more than that,” said Martin. “But what does that matter? You played it. My God, what a fool I have been! There I sat, day after day, and never saw the music.”

Karl Rusoff got up. It had been a very good music-lesson.

“It isn’t ‘stodgy,’” he said. “It isn’t, really. Do you now see one thing out of a hundred perhaps that it means? You have got to be the critic of the music you play,—you have to interpret it. But out of all the ways of playing that, out of all that can be seen in it, you saw nothing, your rendering was absolutely without meaning or colour. To play needs all you are; you gave that fingers only. If I want you to practise fingers only, I will tell you so, and give you a finger exercise or Diabelli. Otherwise you may take it for granted that when your fingers are perfect your work begins. But to play—ah—you have to burn before you play.”

Martin still hung over the piano.

“And I thought it stodgy,” he repeated, looking shy and sideways at Karl’s great grey head.

“Well, you won’t again,” said he. “Will you try it again now?”

“No; how can I?” said Martin. “I’ve got to begin it all over again.”

“Then there was a piece of Bach. Play that. And now read nothing into it except the simplicity of a child. Just the notes,—the more simply the better. Wait a moment, Martin. I want to enjoy it. Let me sit down.”

Martin waited, and then began one of the Suites Anglaises, and like a breath of fresh air in a stuffy room, or like a cloudless dawn with the singing of birds after a night of storm and thunder, the exquisite melody flowed from his fingers, precise, youthful, and joyous. There was no introspection here, no moods of a troubled soul, no doubts or questioning; it sang as a thrush sings, changed and returned on itself, danced in a gavotte, moved slowly in a minuet, and romped through a BourrÉe like a child.

At the end Martin laughed suddenly.

“Oh, how good!” he cried. “Did you know that Bach wrote that for me?” he asked, turning to Karl.

“Yes, I thought he must have,” said Karl. “And with the command that you were to play it to me. You played that very well; all your fingers were of one weight. How did you learn that?”

Martin raised his eyebrows.

“Why, it would spoil it, would it not, to play it any other way?” he asked.

“Certainly it would.”

Then he got up quickly.

“Oh, Martin, you child,” he said. “Did I speak to you roughly about the Schumann?”

“You did rather,” he said. “But I deserved to have my ears boxed.”

The two dined alone, and held heated arguments, not like master and pupil, but like two students who worked side by side, Karl as often as not deferring to the other, Martin as often as not blandly disagreeing with Karl.

“How can you pronounce, for instance,” he asked, “that that Novelette is to be played with those sweatings and groanings, the mere notes being of no use, whereas Bach is to be played with notes only?”

Karl gazed at him in silence.

“You impertinent infant,” he said. “What else do you propose? To play the Schumann as you played it? And the Bach as I played the Schumann?”

“That would sound extremely funny,” remarked Martin. “No, I don’t say you are not right; but how do you know you are right?”

“Because Bach wrote for the spinet,” said Karl. “Have you ever tried to play Schumann on a spinet? It sounds exactly as you made it sound just now. A deplorable performance, my poor boy.”

“You have told me that. Don’t rub it in so. I shall play it very well to-morrow.”

“Or next year,” said Karl, still grim, but inwardly full of laughter. “By the way, there was no ‘dog’ motive in the Lady Sunningdale composition.”

“You can’t have been attending,” said Martin. “Suez Canal came in twice, and Sahara three times, with shrill barks. Yes, please, another cutlet.”

Karl watched him eat it. The process took about five seconds.

“You didn’t taste that,” he remarked.

“No; it was needed elsewhere,” said Martin. “But I’m sure it was very good.”

Karl lingered over the bouquet of his Burgundy.

“It is a strange thing,” he said, “that mankind are so gross as to confuse the sense of taste with greediness. No, my dear boy, I am not at this moment attacking you. But there is no organ, even that of the ear, in this wonderful body of ours so fine as that of taste. Yet to most people the sight of a man deeply appreciating his dinner conveys a feeling of greediness. But I always respect such a man. He has a sense more than most people.”

“But isn’t it greedy?” asked Martin.

Karl became deeply impressive. “It is no more greedy,” he said, “to catch the flavour of an olive or an oyster than to catch the tone of a ’cello.”

“Ah, that would be like encoring a song in an opera—a most detestable habit—and hearing it over and over again. No artist desires that. Fancy hearing Wotan’s Abschied twice. That would be greedy. The art of dining, like most arts, is frightfully neglected in England.”

Martin laughed.

“I have been here, I suppose, a dozen times,” he said, “and every time you give me some surprise. I had no idea you gave two thoughts as to what you ate.”

“That was hasty of you. True, of all the senses, I put the ear first. That is personal predilection. But all the senses really are equal; there is no shadow of reason for supposing that one is more elevated than another. True, some can be more easily misused than others, taste more particularly. But all are subtle gateways to the soul.”

They had finished dinner and Karl pushed back his chair.

“Take an instance,” he said. “Take incense. Does not that smell excite and inspire the devotional sense? Does not the smell of frangipanni—an unendurable odour—suggest a sort of hot-house sensualism? Does not the smell of a frosty November morning bring the sense of cleanness into the very marrow of your bones?”

Martin sniffed experimentally.

“Ah, I know that,” he said. “And the leaves on the beech-trees are red, and the grass underfoot a little crisp with frost. Oh, how good! But what then?”

Karl was watching him closely. It was his conscious object now and always to make Martin think, to excite anything in him that could touch his sense for beauty. He had found that this half-serious, half-flippant method was the easiest means of approach,—for Martin was but a boy. Discussions in an earnest, conscious German spirit both bored and alarmed him. This fact, had his father grasped it, might in years past have helped matters.

“Why, everything,” he replied. “Each sense can be expressed in terms of another. Take magenta in colour,—it is frangipanni in smell; in sound it is—what shall we say?—an Anglican chant of some sort; in taste it is the vague brown sauce in which a bad cook hides his horrors.”

Martin laughed again, with the keen pleasure of youth in all things experimental.

“Yes, that is true,” he said. “How do you go on? Take a fine colour,—vermilion.”

“The blind man said it must be like the sound of a trumpet,” said Karl; “and the blind man at that moment saw. Brandy also for taste is red. So is ammonia,—a pistol to your nostrils.”

Martin dabbed his cigarette on to his dessert plate.

“Yes, yes,” he cried, “and C major is red. And F sharp is blue,—electric blue, like the grotto at Capri——“

He stopped suddenly.

“Am I talking nonsense?” he asked. “If so, it is your fault. You encourage me. You meant to. And what do you mean me to get from it?”

Karl turned directly towards him.

“I mean you to think,” he said. “To frame your life wholly for beauty in whatever form you see it. It is everywhere, be assured of that; and if your eye sees it, store it up like a honey-bee, and bring it home. If your mouth feels it, bring it home. If you smell the autumn morning, bring that home, too. It all makes music.”

He pushed his plate aside and leaned forward towards Martin.

“All is food for you,” he said. “It is only in that way, by harvesting every grain of corn you see, that you can be great. A lot of harvesting is done unconsciously. Supplement that by conscious harvesting. You may learn perfectly all the harmony and counterpoint that can be learned, you may learn to play things impossible, but all that is no good by itself. You can already play,—I am not flattering you, but the reverse,—if you practise a little, all the printed music ever written, as far as notes go. That is no good either. But—if I had not seen this when first I heard you play, I should never have wasted ten minutes of my time on you—you can do more than that. You can, if you are very alert, quite untiring, very critical, and always ready to catch beauty in whatever form it may present itself, you can do more than this. At least I believe so.”

He got up from his seat and leaned his hands on the boy’s shoulders as he sat by the table.

“Ah, Martin, don’t disappoint me,” he said, “or, being old, I shall die of it. Drink from every spring but one, and drink deep.”

Martin turned in his chair and faced him.

“Do I know what spring you mean?” he asked. “Love?”

Karl looked at him with a sort of wonder.

“No, I did not mean that,” he said.

He drew a long breath.

“My God, if that had been granted to me,” he said, “I too might have been great. But I never fell in love. Oh, I am successful; I know I understand; I am the only person, perhaps, who does know what is missing in me. It is that. But missing that, I never, no, not once, parodied what I did not know. Parody, parody!” he repeated.

Martin looked at him with that direct, lucid gaze Karl knew so well, level beneath the straight line of his eyebrows. His smooth, brown cheeks were a little flushed with some emotion he could not have put a name to. Slight injury was there, that Karl could possibly have supposed him bestial, the rest was clean modesty.

“I am not beastly,” he said, “if you mean that.”

“I did mean that,” he said. “And I beg your pardon.”

Martin stood up.

“I think you had no right to suppose that,” he said.

“No, I had none. I did not suppose it. I warned you, though.”

A tenderness such as he had never known rose like a blush into his old bones, tenderness for this supreme talent that had been placed in his hands.

“I only warned you,” he said. “I looked for burglars under your bed, just because—because it is a boy like you that this stupid world tries to spoil. Aye, and it will try to spoil you. Women will make love to you. They will fall in love with you, too.”

Again he paused.

“Things will be made poisonously pleasant for you,” he said. “You can without effort capture brilliant success. But remember all that you get without effort is not, from the point of view of art, conceivably worth anything. Remember also that nothing fine ever grew out of what is horrible. More than that, what is horrible sterilizes the soil,—that soil is you. You will never get any more if you spoil it or let it get sour or rancid. Horror gets rooted there, it devours all that might have been good, all that might have been of the best.”

There was a long silence. Then Karl stepped back and rang the bell. To Martin the silvery tinkle sounded remote. He certainly was thinking now.

“Well, I have done,” said Karl. “Excuse the—the Nonconformist conscience.”

Martin got up.

“I don’t see how one can care—really care—for music and live grossly,” he said. “Yet people appear to manage it. And mawkishness makes me feel sick,” he added with apparent irrelevance.

But Karl understood.

“Somebody has been trying to pet him,” he thought to himself.

They went upstairs to the music-room, and Martin stood before the fire a few moments smoking in silence.

“I like this room,” he said. “It makes me feel clean, like the November morning. I say, how is it that so many people, men and women alike, only think about one subject? Surely it is extraordinarily stupid of them, when there are so many jolly things in the world.”

“Ah, if the world was not full of extraordinarily stupid people,” remarked Karl, “it would be an enchanting place.”

“Oh, it’s enchanting as it is,” cried Martin, throwing off his preoccupation. “May I begin again at once? I want to get through a lot of work to-night. Heavens, there’s a barrel-organ playing ‘Cavalleria.’ Frank is going to introduce a bill next session, he says, putting ‘Cavalleria’ in public on the same footing as obscene language in public. He says it comes to the same thing.”

Stella Plympton about this time was giving a certain amount of anxiety to her parents. The amount, it is true, was not very great, because her father was a happily constituted man who was really incapable of feeling great anxiety except about large sums of money. Consequently, since the extremely large sums of money, all of which he had made, were most admirably invested, his life was fairly free from care. His wife also was quite as fortunate, her complexion was the only thing capable of moving her really deeply, and as she had lately found a new masseuse who was quite wonderful and obliterated lines with the same soft completeness with which bread-crumb removes the marks of lead-pencil, she also, for the present, stood outside the zone of serious trouble.

Between them they occupied, just now, the apex of social as well as most other successes in London, and were a very typically modern couple. Sir Reginald Plympton had in early life invented an oil-cloth of so eminent an excellence that in its manufacture and exploitation he had been too busy to really master the English aspirate, which still bothered him. But to make up for this he had carefully cultivated his aspirations, and had (entirely owing to oil-cloth), while not yet sixty, amassed a colossal fortune, married the daughter of an impecunious duke, won the Derby, and now stood perched on the topmost rung of the ladder of English society. He had a yacht, which never went for long cruises, but always anchored for the night in some harbour. Being a bad sailor, he left it, if there was a chance of bad weather, before it weighed anchor in the morning, and joined it again on the ensuing evening. Similarly he sat in his wife’s opera-box during intervals between the acts, and left his place on the rising of the curtain. He was already a baronet and an M.P., and his peer’s coronet, so to speak, was now being lined.

Yet care, though only like a little draught, just stirred the warm air of Lady Monica’s drawing-room and made the palm-trees rattle. She had often talked the matter over with her husband, who had no very practical suggestion to make. He would stand before her, very square and squat, with his hands in his pockets, rattling money in the one and keys in the other, and say:

“Well, my lady, you give ’er a good talkin’ to. Tell ’er to be a good girl, and be sensible. And now I must be off.”

For the fact was that Stella was now nearly twenty-three. She had refused several very suitable offers, and her mother, extremely anxious, as all good mothers should be, to get her married, had lately begun to be afraid that she was “being silly.” This in her vocabulary meant that Stella was in love with somebody (Lady Monica thought she knew with whom) and was not clever enough to make him propose to her. What added enormity to her “silliness” was the fact that he was extremely eligible. Lady Monica had no sympathy with this sort of thing; she had never been silly herself, and her own sentimental history had been that some twenty-four years ago she had wooed, proposed to, and wedded her Reginald without any fuss whatever or any delay. She was a woman with a great deal of hard, useful common sense; she always knew exactly what she wanted, and almost always got it. Her only weakness, in fact (with the discovery of the new masseuse, her complexion had become a positive source of strength), was for feeble flirtations with young men of the age which she herself wished to look. These never came to anything at all; and when the young man in question married somebody perfectly different, she told all her friends that she had made him. She had during the last week or two, since the session had brought them to London, done a little vicarious love-making to Martin on Stella’s account, and enjoyed it on her own. She was a perfectly honest woman, and only played with fire as a child plays with matches, lighting them and blowing them out, and she never really set fire to herself, and quite certainly never even scorched anybody else.

But anxiety, like a draught, had reached her with regard to Stella’s future, and the next evening, when Lady Sunningdale happened to be giving a menagerie-party, she determined to have a few words with her, for she was looked upon as a sort of book of reference with regard to the twins. The menagerie-party was so called because for a week beforehand Lady Sunningdale drove about London a good deal and screamed an invitation to everybody she saw in the streets. The lions only were fed; the meaner animals and those lions only observed too late to ask to dinner came in afterwards.

Lady Monica and Stella belonged to this second category, and Lady Sunningdale hailed them with effusion.

“Dearest Monica, so glad to see you,” she cried. “All sorts of people are here, whom I’m sure I don’t know by sight, and I’ve just revoked at Bridge (double no trumps, too; isn’t it too dreadful!), and Suez Canal tried to bite the Prime Minister. Wasn’t it naughty? But, you see, Suez is a Radical,—though he shouldn’t bring politics into private life. Stella, I haven’t seen you for years. Yes; Martin’s going to play, of course. Have you heard his tune which imitates me talking in a very large hat? Simply heavenly; exactly like. Even Sunningdale awoke the other evening when he played it, and asked me what I was saying. How are you, Frank? No sign of relenting on the part of the obdurate father? How dreadful! Yes. Dearest Monica, how well you are looking, and how young! (“New masseuse,” she thought to herself. “I must worm it out.”) Do let us go and sit down. I’m sure everybody has come. Oh, there is the Spanish Ambassador. He killed his own father, you know,—shot him dead on the staircase, thinking he was a burglar, and came into all that immense property at the age of nineteen! How picturesque, was it not, and such a very Spanish thing to do! Such a good shot, too. How are you, seÑor? Yes; they are playing Bridge in the next room. And they say there is sure to be a dissolution in the autumn.”

Lady Sunningdale poured out this spate of useful information in her usual manner, addressing her remarks indiscriminately to any one who happened to be near, and Lady Monica waited till the flood showed some sign of abating. She had a vague contempt for Lady Sunningdale’s “methods,” considering that she diffused herself too much. She never caught hold of anything and held tight till everybody else who wanted it let go from sheer fatigue, which was a favourite method of her own. On the other hand, Lady Sunningdale certainly managed to pick up a great many bright objects as she went along, even though she did drop them again almost immediately.

“Do come away and talk to me, Violet,” said Lady Monica, when for a moment there was silence. “I came here entirely to have a confabulation with you.”

“Yes, dear, by all means. I have heard nothing interesting for weeks except the things I’ve made up and told in confidence to somebody, which have eventually come round to me again, also in confidence. What’s it all about?”

As soon as they had found a corner, Lady Monica, as her custom was, went quite straight to the point.

“It’s about Stella,” she said. “Violet, I am afraid Stella is being silly.”

“How, dear? Stella always seems to me so sensible. Such a lovely neck, too; quite like yours. Look, there is poor Harry Bentham. A lion bit his arm off, or was it South Africa?”

Lady Sunningdale cast a roving eye in his direction, kissed the tips of her fingers, and motioned him not to come to her. Lady Monica waited without the least impatience till she had quite finished. Then she went on, exactly where she had left off.

“Well, it’s your dreadfully fascinating Martin Challoner,” she said; “and I’m sure I don’t wonder. My dear, really such terribly attractive people ought to be shut up, not allowed to run about loose. They do too much damage.”

“Well, dear, Stella is only like all the rest of us,” said Lady Sunningdale. “You remember how we all ran after the twins last summer.”

“I know; we all got quite out of breath. But Stella is running still. Now, do you think, you know him so well, that he gives two thoughts to her? They are great friends, they are often together, but if it is all to come to nothing, I shall stop it at once. Stella has no time to waste.”

Lady Sunningdale considered this a moment. She knew all about Monica’s little flirtations with Martin; so also did he, and had imitated her, for Lady Sunningdale’s benefit, with deadly accuracy. But she was too good-natured to spoil sport just because Stella’s mother had been a shade too sprightly for her years. Besides, she meant to say a word or two about that later on, a word that would rankle afterwards.

“My dear, I can’t really tell whether Martin ever thinks about her or not,” she said. “He is so extraordinary; he is simply a boy yet in many ways, and he plays at life as a boy plays at some absurd game, absorbed in it, but still considering it a game. Then suddenly he goes and does something deadly serious, like joining the Roman Church. Practically, also, you must remember that he thinks almost entirely about one thing,—his music. That child sits down and plays with the experience and the feeling and the fingers which, as Karl Rusoff says, have never yet been known to exist in a boy. He is like radium, something quite new. We’ve got to learn about it before we can say what it will do in given circumstances. It burns, and it is unconsumed. So like Martin! But Karl says he is changing, growing up. I can’t help feeling it’s rather a pity. Yes. Of course he can’t be a bachelor all his life; that is impermissible. But Karl always says, ‘I implore you to leave him alone. Don’t force him; don’t even suggest things to him. He will find his way so long as nobody shews it him.’ Karl is devoted to him,—just like a beautiful old hen in spectacles with one chicken.”

But Lady Monica had not the smallest intention of talking about Karl, and led the conversation firmly back.

“Well, Violet, will you try to find out?” she asked.

Lady Sunningdale’s eye and attention wandered.

“Ah, there is Sunningdale,” she said. “Does he not look lost? He always looks like that at a menagerie. Yes, I will try to sound Martin, if you like. I must make him confide in me somehow, and be rather tender, and he will probably tell me, though he will certainly imitate me and my tendencies afterwards. He imitates people who take an interest in him—that is his phrase—too beautifully. I roared,”—Lady Sunningdale cast a quick, sideways glance at her friend,—“simply roared at some imitation he gave the other day of a somewhat elderly woman who took an interest in him. Yes. Poor Suez Canal! He loves parties; but one can’t let him bite everybody indiscriminately. Let us come back, dear Monica, and make the twin play. There he is sitting with Stella. He asked me particularly if she was coming. They are probably talking about golf or something dreadful. Stella is devoted to it, is she not? Yes. That’s the game where you make runs, is it not? I shall have to sound Martin very carefully. He is so quick. Sunningdale, please take Martin firmly by the arm, and if he tries to bite, by the scruff of the neck, and put him down at the piano. No, dear Monica, you can tell nothing by his face. He always looks absorbed and excited like that. If he was talking to you he would look just the same.”

That also was premeditated and vicious, just in case poor Monica’s little love-making, which Martin had imitated so divinely, had not been wholly vicarious. If it had, her remark would pass unnoticed, if it had not—but there was no need to consider whether it had or not, for poor Monica had turned quite red at the mention of Martin’s imitation of the elderly woman who took an interest in him.