d that was capable
of responding to music, she had never seriously inquired. The critical
jargon of the wiseacres always irritated her. She supposed it meant
something because they seemed intelligible to each other but she rather
enjoyed indulging the presumption that it did not. When she went to
concerts, she liked to go alone, or at least to be let alone, to sit back
passively and allow the variegated tissue of sound to envelop her spirit
as it would. If it bored her, as it frequently did, there was no harm
done, no pretense to make. If, as more rarely happened, it stole somehow
into complete possession, floated her away upon strange voyages, she was
at least immune from analysis and inquisition afterward.

So it was with no critical expectancy that she listened when Novelli
began to play; indeed, in the active sense, she did not listen at all.
She forgot to be amused by the composed faces about her; she forgot,
presently, whose music it was and whose voice she heard. What she felt
was a disentanglement, an emergence into more open, wider spaces,--cold
ethereal spaces. It seemed, though, that it was her own mood the music
fitted into, rather than the other way about.

She heard the talk that followed the polite rustle of applause at the
first intermission, without being irritated by it, without even
listening to what it meant, though here and there a phrase registered
itself upon her ear. Henry Craven's "Very modern, of course. No tonality
at all, not a cadence in it," and Charlotte Avery's "No form either. And
hardly to be called a song. A tone poem, really, with a part written
into it for the voice."

The music began again, and now was given ungrudging credit for the
recreation of her mood. Only its admitted beauty created a longing which
it did not serve to satisfy. The cold open sky with its mysterious
interstellar spaces, the flow of the black devouring clouds, the
reemergence of the immortal Pleiades, remote, inhuman, unaware, brought
no tranquillity but only a forlorn human loneliness.

On that note it ended, but Paula, with a nod to Novelli, directed him to
go straight on to the love song. The two do not form a sequence in the
poem; indeed the love song occurs very early in it and the Burial of the
Stars comes afterward, nearly at the end. But I think, as March did, that
Paula's instinct was sound in using the unearthly Schubert-like beauty of
the Burial of the Stars as a prelude to the purely human passion