"Perhaps Tom is more musical than you imagine, my dear," she whispered, maliciously.
"Do you think it's the violin?" I returned, laughingly, ashamed of the feeling of annoyance that her playful pin-prick had given me.
Jealous of Tom! The idea was too absurd. I had so often wished to be, but his devotion to me had always been chronic and incurable. "It's really bad form," I had once said to him; "your indifference to other women, Tom, causes comment. Overemphasis is always vulgar. You underscore our conjugal bliss, my dear boy, in a way that has become a kind of silent reproach to other people. You must really have a mild flirtation now and then, Tom."
It seemed to me that the vivacious Molatti had noted Tom's too apparent enthusiasm, for she smiled and nodded to him as she made ready to coax her Cremona into giving her silent auditors new proof of her most amazing genius. I, a lover of music, had been carried into unknown, blissful realms by the magic of her bow, my whole being throbbing with the joy of strange, weird harmonies that lured my errant soul away from earth, away from my duties as a hostess, my worries as a wife. I came back to my music-room with a thump. Something unusual, out of the common, was taking place, but at first I could not concentrate my faculties in a way to put me in touch with my environment. Presently I realized that Signorina Molatti had left the dais and--could I believe my senses?--that Tom brazenly, nonchalantly, before the gaze of two hundred wondering eyes, had seated himself at the piano.
"What's the matter with him?" whispered Mrs. Van Corlear to me in an awe-struck tone.
"Wait," I answered, irrelevantly; "maybe he won't do it."
"Do what?" she returned, almost hysterically.
"I don't know," I gasped; and the thought flashed through my mind that possibly Tom had been drinking.
There lay the hush of expectancy on the astonished throng. Here and there furtive glances were cast at my program cards in search of Tom's name on a little list made up wholly of world-famous artists. But the large majority of my guests knew as well as I that Tom had never touched a piano in his life, that his ignorance of music was as pronounced as his detestation of it. But he might have been a Paderewski in his total absence of all awkwardness or self-consciousness as he sat motionless at the instrument for a moment, coolly surveying us all, in very truth like a master musician sure of himself and rejoicing in the delight that he was about to vouchsafe to his auditors.
I cannot recall now without a shudder the sensation that cut through my every nerve as Tom raised his large, pudgy hands above the keyboard, his small, gray eyes turned toward the ceiling just above my throbbing head. He looked at that instant like the very incarnation of Philistinism poised to hurl down destruction upon the center of all harmonies.