Now, Spalton was as much in love with Dorothy, his second wife, as I have ever known a man to be in love with a woman. But that could not entirely exclude his jealousy over my sympathetic relation with the "Southern Lady," as the artworkers termed her. And he feared for her on another score. She was, to use a constantly recurring phrase of the Master's, whenever he wished to describe anyone as being wealthy, "lousy with money," and he suspected, not without good cause, that I would warn her against paying exorbitant prices for books and objects of art....
One night I was the cause of an accident which gave him a handle to seize on.
We were having a musicale. A new musician had come to Eos. The former Eos musician, Von Hammer, the father of the prodigy who played the piano, had quarrelled with the Master and had retired to Buffalo. Where, after a brief struggle as teacher of music, he had turned to playing for the movies. It must have nearly slain the man, for he was a sincere artist, a lover of classical music ... and now compelled to play ragtime and popular melodies for a living.
All that I held of him, despite myself, was an unkind remembrance—his breath had been charnel-foul, and always, when discussing anything, he insisted on taking the lapel of his listener's coat and talking directly into his nose....
But his successor was playing at an introductory musicale....
A tall, alert, dark young man ... Italian-dark ... his eyes shone behind his gold-rimmed glasses, swimming large and distorted under the magnification of the lenses ... his lips were full and red, his moustache of a heavy, bristly black that made them look redder and fuller still, almost negroid.
He played the piano with violent, expert energy ... his favourite work was the "Turkish Patrol," which, Spalton exclaimed, as he applauded vigorously, he would now adopt as the Eos anthem.
The drawing-room was crowded ... a few visiting celebrities ... Eoites, too, but only the quasi-celebrities among them. The mass of the workers was as rigidly excluded now, under the new régime, as ordinary retainers ever are.