I explained that the string had broken twice, and I hadn’t got around to putting another in.
“Broken!” he says wildly. “She’s not going to have it there. And now I’ll not get the sound out of my head again!”
I suppose he saw something in my face that made him recollect himself. It was pitiful to see him pull himself together.
“Do your best with it, old chap,” he says hurriedly. “I’m depending on you. My uncle and cousin are to be back from England soon. I—I want everything right when my cousin Charlotte comes.”
He spoke the girl’s name as if it were a charm.
That evening, as we were smoking, he began to talk of his cousin again. She’d stayed with his people while she was going to school, he told me, and she and Cartwright had been great friends.
“She was comforting,” he said. “She made one feel happy and—and normal.” Then he said, in a tone that sounded as if he expected me to contradict him: “She had a good ear for music, too. Not perfect, of course. . . . Did you ever know any one with an ear so perfect that only the eighth interval satisfied them?”
“One or two,” I said, wondering what he was driving at now. “They were cranks, though. One should love music in reason, in my opinion.”
“In reason, that’s it,” Cartwright repeated in a low tone. “My cousin loved it in reason. I couldn’t. Perfection—I was tortured with the idea.”