“It sounds as if she were being tossed in her cabin, doesn’t it?” Camelia’s soft voice murmured under the safe cover of the tumult, her face keeping the expression of grave attention, “and horribly seasick. One hears the bottles breaking, and the basins clashing, and the boots being hurled from side to side. Anything but abstract. Intimately descriptive rather—don’t you think?” A side glint of her eye evidently twinkled for sympathy; but Perior solemnly stared at the ceiling.
“The construction too,” Camelia said more soberly, “she plunged us into the free fantasia—and perhaps at the end she may fish us out with the dominant phrase—but I haven’t caught it yet; ah, this thudding finale announces the journey’s end.” And she jumped up as Lady Henge, with a fine, tense look of soul-experience, rose from the piano. The dazed and wilted listeners chimed out the polite chorus usual on such occasions. Camelia led Lady Henge to her chair. “Thank you—so much,” she said. Lady Henge smiled dimly, her eyes fixed on vacancy.
“It was like a glorious wind blowing about one. It made me think of Wordsworth’s sonnets—of the soul in nature,” said Camelia. Perior still looked stolidly at the ceiling, and she felt his silence to be ominous.
“Such music,” she added, “gives one courage for life.” She was angry with Perior. Lady Henge pressed her hand.
“Thanks, my dear. Yes—you felt. One must hear, of course, a composition many times before entering into the sanctuary of the artist’s meaning.” Camelia’s mouth retained its sympathetic gravity. Perior said nothing; and faint, relieved little groups of talk twittered like birds after a storm.
“And you, Mr. Perior,” Lady Henge, fanning herself largely turned to this silent critic. “You, too, are a musician as I know, a musician at least in appreciation. What do you think of my ‘Thalassa’? Frankly now—as one artist to another.” Perior moved his eyes slowly from the ceiling, and dropped them to Camelia’s face. He grew very red.
“Frankly now,” Lady Henge reiterated with genial urgency.
“I think it is very bad,” said Perior. The sentence fell with a thud, like a stone.
Lady Henge flushed, and her fan fluttered to stillness; Camelia, her eyebrows lightly lifted, met Perior’s square look.
“Bad,” Lady Henge repeated, with a pathetic mingling of deprecating pride and pain, “really bad, Mr. Perior?”