“Nobody has any aim in life—we just drift. Well, what did she say?”
“She sat back in her chair, smiling as if she enjoyed trying to figure it out. Then she said, ‘Oh, Mr. Bard, did you ever listen to a violin until you were entranced?’ I admitted that I had, at times, done so. ‘Well!’ she said, ‘that’s just it. I want to make my life just like a beautiful strain of music.’ Now what do you think of that, Max?”
Lee frowned. “Frothy stuff to me. Unreal, hyper-imaginative, away off the trail, anæmic and supermellifluous.”
Mauney laughed.
“You should have taken up writing,” he said. “Queer family, these Freemans. I never met nor ever heard of anybody a bit like them. The professor is as gentle as a woman, but he gives you a feeling like a storm brewing. It’s hard to express. He’s courteous, refined, and pleasant, but he’s diabolically clever. We haven’t had any lectures from him yet. He was up in his study at home, slaying a book. She introduced me. He couldn’t have been nicer, and yet—well, damn it—you can’t get hold of him. He’s like the ivory playing cards. He slips through your fingers. You think you’ve got him, and just then you notice that he’s miles ahead of you.”
Mauney then shook with sudden laughter.
“What’s the matter with you?” Max said, glaring at him. “Been having a tooth extracted under gas?”
“No. But, I don’t get that family at all. There’s Mrs. Freeman, too. She’s like a velvet comforter laid softly about your soul. Her voice is like velvet. She’s more genuine, I’d wager, than her husband. But—oh, Lord!—there’s some tragedy. Such an endless, engulfing tragedy; so big and endless that she has developed a kind of martyr attitude. She’s like a Sister of the Perpetual Adoration, suddenly required to do penance by living a civil life.”
“I’ll bet the tragedy is her husband!” said Max, with a tone of certitude.