"You are right, I think, and so does Tante, evidently," Karen continued, "about the tempo rubato in the Mozart. It is strange that Monsieur Ivanowski doesn't feel it."
"Ah! but that is it, he does feel it; it is only that he does not think it," said Herr Lippheim, now running his fingers through his hair. "Hear him play the Mozart. He then contradicts in his music all that his words have said."
But though Karen talked so pointedly to him, Herr Lippheim could not keep his eyes or his thoughts from Gregory. "You are a musician, too, Mr. Jardine?" he smiled, bending forward, blinking up through his glasses and laboriously carving out his excellent English. "You do not express, but you have the soul of an artist? Or perhaps you, too, play, like our Karen here."
"No," Gregory returned, with a chill utterance. "I know nothing about music."
"Is it so, Karen?" Herr Lippheim questioned, his guileless warmth hardly tempered.
"My husband is no artist," Karen answered.
It was from her tone rather than from Gregory's that Herr Lippheim seemed to receive his intimation; he was a little disconcerted; he could interpret Karen's tones. "Ach so! Ach so!" he said; but, his good-will still seeking to find its way to the polished and ambiguous person who had gained Karen's heart,—"But now you will live amongst artists, Mr. Jardine, and you will hear music, great music, played to you by the greatest. So you will come to feel it in the heart." And as Gregory, to this, made no reply, "You will educate him, Karen; is it not so? With you and the great Tante, how could it be otherwise?"
"I am afraid that one cannot create the love of art when it is not there, Franz," Karen returned. She was neither plaintive nor confiding; yet there was an edge in her voice which Gregory felt and which, he knew, he was intended to feel. Karen was angry with him.
"Have you seen Belot's portrait of Tante, yet, Franz?"—she again excluded her husband;—"It is just finished."
Herr Lippheim had seen it only that morning and he repeated, but now in preoccupied tones, "Kolossal!"