"But I am not in the least sure I can manage a year in Rome," protested Marise, breaking in with a hurried protest against this taking-for-granted of everything, "I never dreamed of going to Rome! My father...."
"Oh, you can manage it," Madame de la Cueva assured her carelessly, "one can always manage whatever one really wants to do. Especially if it depends on a man."
She crossed the room now to pull at a bell-cord and to order tea of the stout, elderly maid who came. Such a cosmopolitan as Madame de la Cueva would of course have tea.
"We shall have tea together, my dear, to celebrate your birthday and my new plans, and to have a last talk together, the last talk before you grow up."
Her tears were forgotten. They had been shed, and that was the end of them. It was thus that one should live, she believed, crying heartily when one felt like it, and having it over with. She detested what she called the "brain-sickening Anglo-Saxon mania of bottling up emotion till it grows so intense you get no enjoyment out of it," and she was much given to cautioning against this mania those few of her pupils whom she took seriously and for whom she labored her valiant best, pouring out for them all her wisdom, musical and otherwise.
She came back now, and sat before the piano, her amplitude overflowing the stool as a mighty inflooding wave overflows a rock.
"While Giuseppina is making our tea, I'll play to you," she announced. She put her beautiful hands on the keys like a millionaire plunging his hands into a coffer of jewels and offering a choice between pearls and rubies, "What will you have? What do you feel like?"
Marise felt more like an earthquake in full activity than anything else, and chose accordingly, "If I'm going to Rome for a year, I feel like fireworks," she said with a rather breathless laugh, "something Hungarian ... Liszt, perhaps."
Madame de la Cueva settled herself and was off, Marise's heart galloping beside her in the wild rush over the plain. The little lean, wiry, ewe-necked horse under her tore along, sure-footed, as carried away by the stampede as his rider. There was a lance in her hand, a lance with a little blood-red, ragged flag, fluttering loudly against the wind of their forward rush like a bird struggling to escape and fly. Marise heard its throbbing struggle above the rhythmic thunder of the hoofs and felt her heart fluttering like a caught bird in sympathy. And now, with a long, rending slide from bass to treble, it tore itself loose, the wind caught it and whirled it up high over their heads as they plunged along. There it rode among the clouds, like a scarlet storm-bird, sinking and falling and advancing to a longer, nobler, more ample rhythm than that of their many-hoofed clattering. Marise's heart soared up with it, soared out of the noisy clattering, up to the clouds, to the noble, long curves of the wind's soundless advance ... soundless ... the piano was silent. Madame de la Cueva had played the last half-heard, velvet note that was prolonged, prolonged by the sweep of that noble line. She and Marise floated with it for a moment, and then as it swept on and left them, they slowly eddied down to the ground like dry leaves.
Giuseppina came in with the tea. Madame de la Cueva turned round on the piano-stool, a fat, elderly woman with three chins.