“Men like to say so,” she replied. “Because it flatters their vanity to rouse these ‘soft emotions’ and translate them into love for themselves. But have you had any experience, Professor? If any woman had displayed ‘soft emotions’ towards you, would you not have been disposed to nip them in the bud?”
“Most likely! I am not an object for sentimental consideration,—I never was. I should have greatly regretted it if one of your charming sex had wasted her time or herself on me.”
Just then Madame Dimitrius spoke.
“Dear Miss May, will you play us something?”
She readily acquiesced, and seating herself at the grand piano, which was open, soon scored a triumph. Her playing was exquisitely finished, and as her fingers glided over the keys, the consciousness that she was discoursing music to at least one or two persons who understood and appreciated it gave her increased tenderness of touch and beauty of tone. The dreary feeling of utter hopelessness which had pervaded her, body and soul, when playing to her father and mother, “Ma” asleep on the sofa, and “Pa” hidden behind a newspaper, neither of them knowing or caring what composer’s work she performed, was changed to a warm, happy sense of the power to give pleasure, and the ability to succeed—and when she had finished a delicately wild little sonata of Grieg’s, pressing its soft, half-sobbing final chord as daintily and hushfully as she would have folded a child’s hands in sleep, a murmur of real rapture and surprised admiration came from all her hearers.
“But you are an artiste!” exclaimed the Baroness Rousillon. “You are a professional virtuoso, surely?”
“Spare me such an accusation!” laughed Diana. “I don’t think I could play to an audience for money,—it would seem like selling my soul.”
“Ah, there I can’t follow you,” said Chauvet. “That’s much too high-flown and romantic for me. Why not sell anything if you can find buyers?”
His little eyes glittered ferret-like between his secretive eyelids, and Diana smiled, seeing that he spoke ironically.
“This is an age of selling,” he went on. “The devil might buy souls by the bushel if he wanted them!—(and if there were such a person!) And as for music!—why, it’s as good for sale and barter nowadays as a leg of mutton! The professional musician is as eager for gain as any other merchant in the general market,—and if the spirit of Sappho sang him a song from the Elysian fields, he’d sell it to a gramophone agency for the highest bid. And you talk about ‘selling your soul!’ dear Madame, with a thousand pardons for my brusquerie, you talk nonsense! How do you know you have a soul to sell?”