“You are beyond doubt a natural born Wagnerian; I must tell my friend Wingfield how well the audience took his programme. He’s the power behind the orchestra, and he contends that the best is not too good, that people who never heard these things before are just as competent to criticize as trained musicians. You should hear a symphony now—give Beethoven a chance, then try the opera—on and up to the heights.”
“I don’t know about the heights, but I was pretty well up on the slope this afternoon, and the whole world was mine.” She spoke with feeling, this girl who had never heard an orchestra before, but who had followed the trumpets to new and strange summits and still carried dreams in her eyes.
It was a gray November afternoon and he intended to make it easy for her to leave him here, under the bright entrance lights.
“I’m going to Mrs. Blair’s,” she explained.
“Won’t you let me go along, please? You see—you see, I’m dining there!”
“Not really!”
He laughed aloud. He had lied and she was not fair game for falsehood.
“Well, I carry a key to my sister’s front door and I can always have a place there.”
They dropped the discussion for the moment; it was quite a mile to the Blair’s and the moment was sufficient unto itself. He forgot that there could be any question of her accepting his escort. His heartbeats quickened as he found her walking beside him with a free step that fell in comfortably with his own swinging stride. She walked as people walk who are bred in a hill country—with a slight sway of the body from the hips—and she carried her head high. In imagination he robed her in fashionable raiment, a figure of distinction in any company, only to protest to himself that her qualities were superior to feathers or flounces and were as new in her as though no woman had ever possessed them before. The music still sang in her heart; she had been greatly moved by it. Before Sargent’s portrait he had felt only her tyro’s ineptness; but music had stolen her away from herself, and carried her close to golden lands of promise.
“How does the work go at the Institute?”