The other shrugged his shoulders.
“Same thing. Plays occasionally, and plays well, too; but he's so erratic it's difficult to get him to do it. Everything must be just so, you know—air, light, piano, and audience. He's got another book out, I'm told—a profound treatise on somebody's something or other—musical, of course.”
“And he used to write music; doesn't he do that any more?”
“I believe so. I hear of it occasionally through musical friends of mine. They even play it to me sometimes. But I can't stand for much of it—his stuff—really, Billy.”
“'Stuff' indeed! And why not?” An odd hostility showed in Billy's eyes.
Again Calderwell shrugged his shoulders.
“Don't ask me. I don't know. But they're always dead slow, somber things, with the wail of a lost spirit shrieking through them.”
“But I just love lost spirits that wail,” avowed Billy, with more than a shade of reproach in her voice.
Calderwell stared; then he shook his head.
“Not in mine, thank you;” he retorted whimsically. “I prefer my spirits of a more sane and cheerful sort.”