ied to
anything; harnessed, you know. Somehow, I've managed to do without. But
I've had to do without hearing, except in my own head, any of the music
I've written. There was an old tin trunk full of it, on paper, that
looked as if it was never going to be anywhere else. Well, I came to a
sort of conviction after I went away from here that night, that those two
facts were cause and effect; that unless I submitted to be harnessed I
never would hear any of it. And it seemed that night that I couldn't
manage to do without hearing it. Keats was wrong about that, you
know,--about unheard melodies being sweeter. They can come to be clear
torment. So I decided I'd begin going in harness. I suppose it was rather
naive of me to think that I could, all at once, make a change like that.
Anyhow, I found I couldn't go on with this. I brought it around
to-day,--it's out there in the hall--to turn it over to Paula to do with
as she liked. That's why it was so--incredible, when you came down the
stairs instead."

He sprang up then to go, so abruptly that he gave her the impression of
having abandoned in the middle, the sentence he was speaking. This time,
however, rising instantly, she released him and in a moment he was gone.
There had been a word from him about her father, the expression of
"confident hopes" for his recovery, and on her part some attempt, not
successfully brought off she feared, to assure him of his welcome when he
came again. She didn't shake hands with him and decided afterward that it
must have been he who had avoided it.

She was glad to have him go so quickly. She wanted him to go so that she
could think about him. It was with a rather buoyant movement that she
crossed the room to the piano bench and very lightly with her finger-tips
began stroking the keys, the cool smooth keys with their orderly
arrangement of blacks and whites, from which it was possible to weave
such infinitely various patterns, such mysterious tissue.

A smile touched her lips over the memory of the picture her fancy had
painted the night Paula sang his songs, the sentimental notion of Paula's
inspiring him with an occasional facile caress to the writing of other
love songs. She might have been a boarding-school girl to have thought of
that. She smiled, too, though a little more tenderly, over his own
attempt--naive he had called it--to go in harness, like a park hack,
submissive to Paula's rein and spur. Pegasus at the plow again. She
s