I was the only caller the next Sunday. Galt did not appear. Tea was served in that middle room, between the parlor and dining room, which was a domain over which Vera exercised feudal rights. That was why it was more attractive than any other part of the house. It expressed something of her personality. Conversation was low-spirited and artificial. Natalie was not her sparkling self. Mrs. Galt was in her usual state of pre-occupation, though very gracious, and helpful in warding off silences. I do not know how these things are managed. Presently Vera and I were alone. I asked her to play. Her performance, though finished and accurate, was so empty that I said without thought: “Why don’t you let yourself go?”
“Like this?” she said, turning back. And then, having no music in front of her, she played a strange tumultuous Russian thing with extraordinary power. I begged her to go on. Instead she left the piano abruptly and stood for a minute far away at the window with her back to me, breathing rapidly, not from the exertion of playing, I thought, but from the emotional excitement of it. Then she called me to come and look at a group of Sunday strollers passing in the street,—three men and two women, strange, dark aliens full of hot slothful life. The men around their middles wore striped sashes ending in fringe, and no coats, like opera brigands; the women were draped in flaming shawls. All of them wore earrings.
“What are they?” she asked.
Immigrants, I guessed, from some odd corner of Southern Europe, who hadn’t been here long enough to get out of their native costume.
“They will be drab soon enough,” she said, turning away.
I wanted to talk of her playing, being now enthusiastic about it, but she put the subject aside, saying, “Please don’t,” and we talked instead of pictures. There was a special exhibition of old masters at the Metropolitan Museum which she hadn’t seen. Wouldn’t I like to go? It came out presently that she painted. I asked to see some of her things and she got them out,—two or three landscapes and some studies of the nude. She had just begun working in a life class, she said.
“Very interesting,” I said, trying to get the right emphasis and knowing instantly that it had failed. She gathered them up slowly and put them away.
“They are like your playing,” I added, “as you played at first.”
“How do you mean?”