"No, a requiem; that is a kind of requiem--more correctly a morning impromptu, the last thoughts of a dying poacher."
"Oh how interesting! Pray let me hear it."
"It is a rather complicated piece of music, Fräulein Capriani," Fermor always ignores the Capriani patent of nobility--"if you are not especially fond of our German classic masters ...."
"I adore Wagner and Beethoven."
"Then, indeed, I will .... but the harmony is very complicated!"
Whereupon he began, with closed eyes, after the fashion of pretentious dilettanti, to deliver himself of a piece of music, the beginning of which reminded one of a piano-tuner, and the intermediate portion of the triumphal march of an operetta, and which, after it had lasted half an hour, and the audience had given up all hope of relief, suddenly, and without any apparent reason stopped short, a common termination where there has been no reason for beginning.
"C'est divin!" Ad'lin exclaimed. "Your composition, Count, reminds me of the intermezzo of the Fifth symphony."
"You are mistaken, Fräulein Capriani, my composition recalls no other music!" Fermor said, greatly irritated.
With his eyes glowing, his full red underlip trembling, and his manner insolently obtrusive, Capriani threw himself down beside Charlotte Malzin upon the sofa and stretched his arm along the back of it behind her shoulders.
"Come and help me with my work, Count Malzin," Frau von Capriani called kindly from her pile of cretonne. "You have so steady a hand."