It brings an instinct from some other sphere,
For its fine senses are familiar all,
And with the unconscious habit of a dream,
It calls and they obey.
N. P. WILLIS.
It has been with the greatest reluctance that I have agreed to submit to the public all the details, so far as they are known to me, of my husband's seemingly miraculous change from an average man into a genius. Poor Tom! He was so happy as a phlegmatic, well-balanced, common-place lawyer and clubman, devoted to his wife, his profession and his friends! But now, alas, his amazing eccentricities demand from me a presentation of his case that shall change censure into sympathy and malicious gossip into either silence or truth.
I am forced to admit at the outset that Tom is justified in attributing his present predicament to my own fondness for music. He had protested, gently but firmly, against the series of musicals that I had planned to give last season.
"They'll be an awful nuisance, my dear," he had remarked, gloomily, gazing at me appealingly across the table at which we were dining en tête-à-tête. "Why not substitute bridge whist in place of the music? Why will you insist on asking a crowd of people who don't care a rap for anything but ragtime to listen to your high-priced soloists? A musical, Winifred, is both expensive and tiresome."
"What a Philistine you are, Tom!" I exclaimed, protestingly, knowing, however, that my dear old pachyderm would not wince at the epithet I had hurled at him across the board. Tom's vocabulary is not large, and possesses a legal rather than a Biblical flavor.
"What's a Philistine?" he asked, indifferently. "If it's a fellow who objects to inviting a lot o' people that he doesn't like to listen to a lot o' playing and singing that they don't like, well, then, I'm it. But what's the use of my getting out an injunction? If you've made up your mind to give these musicals, Winifred, I might as well quash my appeal. I've no standing in this court."
One of the advantages of living with a man for ten years is that one is eventually confronted by a most fascinating problem. "Why did I marry him?" is the question that adds a keen zest to existence. We derive a new interest in life from the hope that the future may provide us with an answer to this query. I can remember now, to my sorrow, that I gazed across the table at Tom's heavy, immobile face, and longed for some radical, perhaps supernatural, change in the man that should render him more congenial to me, more sympathetic, less practical, matter-of-fact, commonplace. A moment later I felt ashamed of myself for the disloyalty of my wish. It may be that subsequent events were preordained as a punishment to me for the internal discontent to which I had temporarily succumbed.
"Tom doesn't look quite fat, my dear," remarked Mrs. Jack Van Corlear to me early in the evening of my first--and last--musical. "Is he working too hard? Jack tells me that Tom has been made counsel for the Pepper and Salt Trust."
"It's not that," I answered, lightly, glancing at Tom and noting the unusual pallor of his too fleshy face. "He's expecting an evening of torture, you know. He hates music. He can't tell a nocturne from a ballade--and they both torment him. But he's an awfully good fellow, isn't he? See, he's trying to talk to Signor Turino. I hope he'll remember that Verdi didn't write 'Lohengrin.' I've been coaching Tom for several days, but it's hard, my dear Mrs. Jack, to make a man who doesn't play or sing a note remember that the Moonlight Sonata is not from Gounod's 'Faust,' and that it's bad form to ask Mlle. Vanoni if she admires 'Florodora.'"
My duties as hostess and the pronounced success of the earlier numbers of my program led me presently to forget Tom's existence. He had been cruelly unjust to my guests in asserting that they would prefer ragtime to the classics. The applause that had rewarded the efforts of both Turino and Vanoni had been spontaneous and genuine. Signorina Molatti had created an actual furor with her violin solo, intensified, no doubt, by her marvelous beauty. It was Molatti's success that presently recalled Tom to my reluctant consciousness. As the dark-eyed, fervid young woman responded smilingly to an insistent encore, I caught a glimpse of my unimpressionable husband, standing erect at the rear of the crowded music-room and watching the girl's every movement with eyes alight with interest and approval. I had not seen his unresponsive countenance so animated before in years. Mrs. Jack Van Corlear had followed my glance, and a mischievous smile was in her face as she leaned toward me.