"The wretch is terribly clever!" she exclaimed. "But he seems to me destructive."
"Well, but—" began Elliot. "Some such accusation has been brought against many really great men. The Empress Frederick told a friend of mine that no one who had not lived in Germany, and observed German life closely, could understand the evil spread through the country by Wagner's Tristan."
"Then the fault, the sin if you like, was in the hearers," said Heath, almost with excitement.
He got up and stood by the fire.
"Wagner was a builder. I believe Germany is the better for a Tristan, and I believe we should be the better for an English Tristan. But I doubt if we gain essentially by the drama in cap and bells."
Elliot, who was fond of defending his friends, came vigorously to the defense of the playwright, to whom he was devoted and whose first nights he seldom missed. In the discussion which followed Charmian saw more clearly how peculiarly in tune her mother's mind was with Heath's.
"This is the beginning of a great intimacy," she said to herself. "One of mother's great intimacies."
And, for the first time she consciously envied her mother, consciously wished that she had her mother's brains, temperament, and unintentional fascination. The talk went on, and presently she drifted into it, took her small part in it. But she felt herself too brainless, too ignorant to be able to contribute to it anything of value. Her usually happy and innocent self-conceit has deserted her, with all her audacities. She was oddly subdued, was almost sad.
"How old is he really?" she thought more than once as she looked at Claude Heath.
There was no mention of music, and at last Mrs. Mansfield got up to go.