“Weber’s ‘Invitation,’” died away in the girl’s throat.
“Weber’s ‘Rubbish,’ you idiot! It is as little like the ‘Invitation’ as the music of my cats is like the ‘Funeral March.’ But you have a good touch. Something may be made of you when you have learnt your scales, and know how to sit before a piano. Seat low, thumb covered, body tranquil. Are you prepared to regard yourself as a beginner, with less knowledge than a stammering infant—or do you still cherish the opinion of ‘Everybody’ that you are very clever?”
“I know very well that I am quite ignorant, and it is because I want to learn that I have come to you,” Andromache said, with a simple dignity that mollified the artist.
“Well, I see you are not a fool like your respectable mother,” she said. “Now go home and practice as many scales as you can for three or four or even more hours a day, and come to me at the end of a week. Hard work and slow results, remember.”
CHAPTER IV. AN ATHENIAN HOUSEHOLD.
Among the many curious customs of the modern Athenians—at least those unprovided with permanent tents—is their habit of changing residence every first of September. When they go into each new house, they have at last found their earthly paradise, which they at once begin to maltreat in every possible way, until, by summer-time there is hardly a clean spot left on any of the walls, a door left with a handle, a cupboard with a lock, or a window with a fastening entire in its panes. Then the earthly paradise, is described in terms as exaggeratedly expressive of the reverse of comfort; the family look around for the next September move, and a new home or flat is found with the same fate awaiting it. The only rational way of accounting for this startling custom, which would greatly disturb any reasonable person compelled to follow it, is by supposing that the natives find something exciting and morally or mentally beneficial in their annual migrations.
In compliance with the law, Andromache’s mother, the previous September, had moved from a flat on the second floor in Solon Stettore, a ground floor flat with plenty of underground accommodation, in one of the many yet unnamed streets that break from the foot of Lycabettus like concentric rays to drop into the straight line of Solon Street, and proceed on a wider and recognised course down among the larger thoroughfares. These baby passages are rarely traversed by any but those who enjoy the qualified happiness of living in them. There is always a river of flowing water edging their entrance like a barrier, which a lady with dainty boots would doubtless view with disapprobation if she were asked to ford it upon an afternoon call. Children by the hundred play about these streets—variously coloured children, ragged, ugly, showing every condition but that of cleanliness and beauty, with little twisted mouths and sharp black eyes that always seem to be measuring in the spectator a possible foe; with coarse matted hair, or shaven heads looking like nothing more than the skin of a mouse worn as a skull cap, or dirty straw, bleached nearly white, hanging about them in unapproachable wisps and understood to be fair hair. As well as the householders, the infants, and running water, the streets offer, as further attraction, the cries of the itinerant merchants, who draw their carts up the dusty, unpaved little hills, and yell out the contents of their store in a way only to be heard in burning cities, where yelling, public and domestic, becomes an art, cultivated with zeal, and heard with joy—by all but the nervous traveller. All day long these vendors come and go, and the aforementioned happy householders need only appear on their thresholds to buy stuffs, soap, candles, sponges, carpets, etc.
In the sweet spot Kyria Karapolos had pitched her tent with her family, consisting of two sons, the eldest a dashing captain of the Artillery, known in town as Captain Miltiades, understood to have no relations, and to sleep on horseback, dine on gallantry and the recital of his own prowess, and enjoy relaxation from equine exercise in the ball-room. The second son, Themistocles, a dapper little fellow, had a position in the Corinthian Bank, not very remunerative, but enabling him to dress with what he considered Parisian taste, and walk Stadion Street with two or three other fashionable youths, all equally gloved, caned—and killing. He had a violin too, and disliking his family, when constrained to remain at home, spent the time in his own room, which looked out upon the sloping gardens of the French School, and tortured the silence by irritating this poor instrument, deluded into a fond belief that he was playing Gounod’s “Ave Maria” and Schubert’s “Serenade.”