She slipped it off and hung it on the gate. Not until she had done so, did it occur to her that she had obeyed a command, given with an authority which was inborn and unconscious that such a thing as opposition existed in the human breast.
“If I could compose a melody noble, tender, wistful.... Ah! I lack the words to describe it! But if I could compose it I would call it ‘Rosamond.’”
“And dedicate it to me as if I were a royal highness.”
He frowned.
“Not at all!” he asserted almost with violence. “I compose no masterpieces for royal highnesses. Royal highnesses are ugly and artificial. But you! Fair Rosamond, they tell me—Miss Watts, I think it was, told me last—that you were born on the farm. ‘Farm product,’ she called you. Your mother....”
“Made and sold butter! I am sure all Roseborough has informed you of that!”
“Ah, yes!” eagerly. “Almost every lady here—knowing by intuition how I would regard it—has told me this. And to each I have expressed my delight. Butter! how fragrant—how mellow! It is for you the perfect origin. Clover and hay and the sweet things of earth! Butter! It enraptures me to think your childish hands played in the churn with what Nature alone had produced.” He caught her hands and kissed them fervently.
“So that is how you think of it?” she smiled.
“Hush; I wish to play you the little Tschaikowsky.”
He leaned his head over the instrument again and began to play. Watching him, she noted the whitening temple-locks against the coal black of his hair where it had not turned, and the lines in his thin, dark-skinned face, and wondered what sorrow had written these marks of age upon so young a man.