Frieda seized upon the chocolates, greedily. She is one of those dear stout people, who assure you that they hardly ever eat anything and whom one always finds endowed with a fine appetite.
"It's too bad about Baby Paul," she said. "He is yet too young to be stuffed with sweets or amused with toys."
"I presume that a nursling is the only really normal human being," remarked Gordon. "He possesses but the most natural desires, has no ambitions unconnected with feeding and sleeping, and expresses his emotions without concealment. Affectation is foreign to him, and his virtues and vices are still in abeyance."
"Paul," declared Frances, indignantly, "is extremely intelligent and has no vices at all."
"I stand corrected, Mrs. Dupont. He is the exception, of course, and I only spoke in general. Frieda, my dear, won't you be so obliging as to open the piano and play something for us? I don't suppose it will awaken the baby, will it?"
"He just loves music," asserted his mother. "When I play, he often opens his eyes and listens quietly, ever so long. I know that it pleases him, ever so much. His—oh! He must have music in his soul! How—how could it be otherwise?"
Frieda hurried to the piano and opened it, after giving the stool a couple of turns. She began with some Mendelssohn. Frances was holding her baby in her arms, her wonderful head bent towards the little one, with a curve of her neck so graceful that it fascinated me. Gordon was also looking at her with a queer, eager look upon his features. He knew as well as I that she had heard again some vibrant music of former days, had felt the sound-waves that trembled in her own soul, and that, to her, the child represented something issued from wondrous melodies, a swan's song uplifted to the heavens and bearing with it the plaint of a lost happiness.
"Oh! Frieda, some—something else," she cried. "I—I—Just play some Chopin."
At once Frieda complied. Where on earth does the woman find the ability to play as she does? She tells me that she hardly ever practises, and, in my many visits to her, I have never chanced to find her at the piano, though she possesses a very fair instrument. But I think I understand; what I mistake for technique must chiefly be her wonderful sentiment and the appreciation of beauty that overshadows some faults of execution. Frieda's real dwelling place is in a heaven of her own making, that is all beauty and color and harmony. From there come her painting and her music, which evidently enter her being and flow out at the finger-tips. I have always thought that if her color-tubes had not possessed such an overwhelming attraction for her, she might have become one of the most wonderful musicians of the world.
Gradually, Frances raised her head again, until it finally rested on the back of the armchair, with the eyes half-closed under the spell of Frieda's playing. By this time she had perhaps forgotten the memories evoked by the "Songs Without Words," that had for a moment brought back to her the masterful bow that had made her heart vibrate, for the first time, with the tremulousness of a love being born. Chopin did not affect her in the same way, and she was calm again. Frieda came to the end of the "Valse Brillante" and took up the "Berçeuse." Then the young mother closed her eyes altogether. The melody brought rest to her, and sweetness with a blessed peace of soul.