“Bah, bah! Excuse my frankness, but don’t be a child. If you haven’t touched your violin for two years, you have allowed two precious years to leak away. All the more reason for stopping the leak at once. Come in.”
“We had arrived in front of an English-basement house in Seventeenth street.
“Come in,” he repeated. “This is where I live.”
“It is too late,” I said.
“Nonsense,” he retorted. “It is never too late. Advance!”
I followed him into the house.
The room to which he conducted me was precisely the sort of room one would have expected. It was chock-full of odds and ends, piled about in hopeless confusion. The walls were hung with a reddish paper, and freckled with framed and unframed pictures—etchings, engravings, water-colors, charcoals, some suspended correctly by wires from the cornice, others pinned up loosely by their corners. The ceiling was tinted to harmonize with the walls. The floor was carpetless, of hard wood, waxed to a high degree of slipperiness, and relieved by a sporadic rug or two. Bits of porcelain and metal ware, specimens of old Italian carving, Chinese sculptures in ivory, rich tapestries, bronze and plaster reproductions of antique statuary, and books of all sizes and descriptions and in all stages of decay, were scattered hither and thither without a pretense to order. On the whole the effect of the room was pleasant, though it resembled somewhat closely that of a curiosity-shop gone mad. My host informed me that it was Liberty Hall and bade me make myself at home. Producing a flagon of Benedictine, he said laconically, “Drink.”
We drank together in silence. Turning his emptied glass upside down, “Now,” he cried, “now for the music. Now you are going to play.”
“Oh, I thought you had forgotten about that,” I answered.
“‘Tis not among my talents to forget,” he declaimed, theatrically. “You must prepare to limber up your fingers.”