Over her sewing she let her mind run free, forgetting this present Sunday with its problems, mixing a pleasant amalgam of the past. She wasn't heartbroken, you know, hardly regretful. She had life about as she wanted it. She never had been in love with March in the accepted meaning of the phrase—she had never even thought she was—and it is altogether probable that if she had found him eager to resume the old relation, she would have felt a certain reluctance about taking it up again. Life changed with the years and some of its old urgencies quieted down—for the time anyhow. Still the night when she had worn those sweet peas remained a fragrant memory. She was recalled to the present by the violent gesture he made over the score on his work table.
"This damned thing is rotten," he said with angry conviction. "I knew it,—I knew it while I wrote it. It may be what they want, but it's rotten. Straight into the stove is where it ought to go."
"Is that what you're writing for Mrs. Wollaston?" she asked.
He nodded. "I was trying to make up my mind whether to take this with me to-day or not. If she's the musician I think she is, she'll tell me to carry it out to the ash can."
"Well, that will be better than putting it in the stove yourself," she observed, going back with an air of placidity to her sewing, "because then you'll know it's bad and if you burn it up now, you won't. You haven't even heard it."
"I heard it before I wrote it," he argued. "I hear it again when I read it. That's a silly argument. Of course I know it."
"You said a little while ago that you'd never heard any of your music until Mrs. Wollaston sang those songs. They sounded better than you thought they would."
"That's different," he protested. "I knew they were good, damned good. Only I didn't quite realize how good they were. I suppose I won't realize until I hear her sing this how rotten it is. But I don't need to. I know well enough right now."
He went on turning the pages back and forth with gloomy violence, reading a passage here and another there and failing to get the faintest ray of comfort out of any of it, even out of the old soiled quires which belonged obviously to the original score.
"Is it all bad?" she asked. "Or just the new part."