sta Holmes, Ethel Smyth. Why had
there been no female Beethovens, Liszts, or even Chopins? The reason,
asserted a middle-aged man, was that women's emotions were too
thoroughly instinctive to be projected in the form of first-class
music, which was, in fine, emotion analyzed, compressed within the
limits of fixed rules, expressed by series of arbitrary signs. In the
midst of his conclusion, however, he lost his self-satisfied smile: he
had caught sight of Lilla, who was looking at him blankly as though he
had slammed a transparent door in her face.

She heard Brantome benevolently murmuring the platitude:

"It is often in making others forget their sorrows that one diminishes
one's own, and in doing good to others that one finds good for oneself."

She showed him a bitter smile.

"Yes, charity. The usual prescription. I have already tried it." She
added, "Of course those poor people in their poverty and illnesses
merely appeared to me as a means for my own relief. In helping them I
didn't think of their troubles, but of forgetting my own. Sometimes
when I've written a check I almost expect it to buy me a less gloomy
day. At such moments I should be absurd if I weren't contemptible."

"Bah! you are unjust to yourself."

It was true. Lilla, who had suffered so much from her exceptional
temperament, could not bear to see others suffer; and in the grip of
her own weaknesses she had always felt compassion for the weak.

"But I ought not to come here," she said.

She explained that in this place she "felt her worthlessness." It
would be better, she thought, to remain in the Brassfield state of
mind: thus one might find an anodyne for this sense of insignificance.
For, to those others, of course, wealth and social position were the
important things in life, magnificently making up for the lack of other
qualities. If they had artistic enthusiasms, it was because they
regarded the arts as did the Roman conquerors--as elements created for
no other reason than to enhance their triumphs. Debussy, she
suggested, had been born to give them a cause for displaying their
jewels at the opera, just as Titian had existed in order that their
acquisition of a painting by his hand might be cabled round the world.
In that region of inverted values one took on the egotism of the fabled
frog in the well, who laughed to scorn the frog that came to tell him
of the ocean.

"But the well is so prettily gilded," Lilla remarked.