The English author was a great partisan of Jews, and he asserted that they were more distinguished in science and the arts than any other race. The Jewish question was dropped in an instant, when they saw a smart lady come in accompanied by a pale man with a black shock of hair and an uneasy eye.
“That is the Hungarian violinist Kolozsvar,” said Susanna.
“Kolozsvar, Kolozsvar!” they heard everybody saying.
“Is he a great virtuoso?” Cæsar asked Kennedy.
“No, I think not,” answered Kennedy. “It seems that this Hungarian’s speciality is playing the waltzes and folk-songs of his own country, which is certainly not anything great; but his successes are not obtained with the violin, but among the women. The ladies in London fight for him. His game is to pass himself off as a fallen man, depraved, worn-out. There you have his phraseology.... They see a man to save, to raise up, and convert into a great artist, and almost all of them yield to this temptation.”
“That is comical,” said Cæsar, looking curiously at the fiddler and his lady.
“To a Spaniard,” replied Kennedy, “it is comical; and probably it would be to an Italian too; but in England there are many women that have a purely imaginative idealism, a romanticism fed on ridiculous novels, and they fall into traps like these, which seem clumsy and grotesque to you here in the South, where people are more clear-sighted and realistic.”
Cæsar watched the brave fiddler, who played the role of a man used up, to great perfection.
After tea, Susanna invited them to go up to her rooms, and Laura and her brother and Kennedy and Mr. Russell went.
The English author had met a colleague, with whom he stayed behind talking, and Marchmont remained in the “hall,” as if it did not seem to him proper for him to go to his wife’s rooms.