But he had misjudged his lady—and soon he sensed it.
Under all her flare for willfulness, and her disconcerting blend of dainty atrocities and personal aplomb, Mrs. Hilary had sound instincts and inherited good taste. She fluttered her skirts with some rumpus of silken frou-frou (to speak in metaphor), but she never lifted them above her ankles. Her home was her temple, she, its goddess, was chaste as erratic, and to her half-southern blood a guest was very sacred.
She gave him an exquisite meal and a thoroughly good time, but she never once made love to him or even gave him a provocative opening to make love to her. And with admirable masculine consistency almost he felt that had she done either or both he might have borne it—yes—cheerfully.
But she did not. She was grave. She was gay. She showed him her cloisonné and her ivories, her etchings and her Sargent, she played to him, and she sang a little. She flattered him, and she gave him some rare dole of subtle petting, but she did no wooing, and seemed inclined to brook none.
What a woman! She set him to thinking. And he thought.
Next to his profession, in which he was deeply absorbed—but not narrowly so, for this dapper, good-looking man was a great physician, and not in-the-making—Horace Latham cared more for music, and needed it more, than he did for anything else—even pictures. All that was most personal to him, all that was strongest and finest in him, quivered and glowed quickest, surest, longest, at the side of a dissecting table, and to the sound of music, violin-sweetness, harp-magic, the song of a piano, the invocation of an organ, the lyric lure of a voice.
But it had to be good music. Helen played prettily, and bored him. Hugh was everlastingly discoursing rag-time with his two first fingers, and Latham itched to chloroform him.
He had never heard Mrs. Hilary attempt music. And when, after lunch, uninvited she sat down at her piano he winced.
She played wonderfully. What a surprising woman! She played Greig to him and Chopin, and then she sang just twice: “Oft in the Stilly Night”—his mother had sung that to him in the dear long-ago, and then a quaint pathetic darky melody that he had never heard before.
“Oh! please,” he begged as she rose.