She got up and sat down at the piano.
With no discoverable motive she commenced to play the piece that she now knew was Chopin’s Black Note Etude (in G flat). It was the one she had heard years ago when she stood in the scented dusk of the Ridgeway in front of the house with the corner bay-window. Since then she had learned it thoroughly and played it many times on concert platforms. But as she played it now it sounded new, or rather, it sounded as if she had heard it only once before, and that was many years ago in the summer twilight. All between was a gap, a void which only the Chopin Etude could bridge....
(In her strange mood she was playing it most abominably, by the way.)
She paused in the middle. Her eyes were like dark gems amidst the red glory of her hair.
“I’m not in love with any person,” she told herself with incredible calmness. “I’m not in love with anybody in the world. But I’m in love with Something. Some Thing! Very deeply, very passionately, I am. And I don’t know what it is.... I keep finding it and losing it again. But it’s in this”—she started the first few bars of the Chopin piece—“it’s all everywhere in that. I knew it was there when I stood and listened to it years ago. Oh, it’s there. And I’ve heard and seen it in other places, too. But as yet it’s been only a thing.... But some day, maybe, I’ll tack it on to somebody living, and then ... God help me! ...”
Her fingers flew over the keys, and the great octaves began to sing out in the left hand.
“I’ll have to be careful,” she went on in thought—“careful, or else some day I’ll go mad.... But it’s there, whatever it is.... Something that’s in that and that’s in me as well, and they’re nearly tearing me to shreds to get closer to one another. That’s how it feels.... And I told him I wasn’t in love with anybody ... But if I should catch a glimpse of this something in any living being! Nothing should ever keep us apart! Nothing could! Neither life nor death—nor miles—nor anything.”
She let her hands fall down the keyboard in a great culminating Niagara of octaves. Two chords like the blare of trumpets, and ...
The door opened and Verreker entered.
She paused with her hands poised on the keys.