Marya, in black, arranged her tiger-ruddy hair before an ancient grotesquerie set with a reflecting glass in which, on some days, one could see the form of the Lord Buddha, though none could ever tell from whence the image came.
Where Vanya had left his music opened on the piano rack, the sacred pages now stirred slightly as the soft wind blew; and scented bells of Frisia swayed and bowed around a bowl where gold-fish glowed.
Marya, at the piano, reading at sight from his inked manuscript, came presently to the end of what was scored there––merely the first sketch for a little spring song.
Some day she would finish it as part of a new debt––new obligations she had now assumed in the slowly increasing light of new beliefs.
As she laid Vanya’s last manuscript aside, under it she discovered one of her own––a cynical, ribald, pencilled parody which she remembered she had scribbled there in an access of malicious perversity.
As though curious to sound the obscurer depths of what she had been when this jeering cynicism expressed her mood, she began to read from her score and words, playing and intoning:
The vicious irony of the atrocious parody––words and music––died out in the sunny silence: for a few moments the girl sat staring at the scored page; then she leaned forward, and, taking the manuscript in both hands, tore it into pieces.
She was still occupied in destroying the unclean thing when a servant appeared, and in subdued voice announced Palla and Ilse.
They came in as Marya swept the tattered scraps of paper into an incense-bowl, dropped a lighted match upon them, and set the ancient bronze vessel on the sill of the open window.