e sunshine that oppressed and
stimulated her delicate tissues, she stood before an old Arab who,
seated on the ground, told her fortune by strewing sand on a board.

"You will be loved by men," he said, after contemplating apathetically
the curlicues of sand. "And will be the death of men," he added,
closing his eyes as if bored; for out there, in the mountains beyond
Constantine, love and death, as partners in the fates of fair women,
were commonplace.

Before returning to America, Aunt Althea always managed a visit to
Rome. On her first day there, the spinster drove out alone, returning
at twilight with her eyelids swollen and red. She had been, she said,
to the English cemetery; but she declared that nobody whom she had
known was buried there.

They visited American ladies who had married into the Roman nobility.
In those historic palaces the great rooms were cool, dim, and resonant,
the women's voices died away in space between the tapestried walls and
the ceilings frescoed with pagan deities. Through the tall doorway
entered young men with medieval faces, in quest of a cup of tea.

To Lilla these descendants of medieval despots seemed curiously dwarfed
by their surroundings.

But her eyes were apt to turn wistful when she passed the shabby cafes
where famous artists had sat brooding over the masterpieces that she
admired. Then she thought of Bohemian studios at dusk, and of geniuses
aquiver, like dynamos, with the powers that had taken possession of
them. She envied the women whose lives were united to theirs in an
atmosphere where beauty was always being recreated, who basked in that
radiance of art which love, perhaps, had inspired.

Of all the arts it was music that cast over Lilla the strongest spell.

During the winter season in New York, she haunted concert halls where
celebrated musicians played their works. The new music, however,
strident with the echoes of industrialism, dissonant with the tumult of
great cities, repelled her. She turned instinctively toward the
harmonious romanticism and idealism of a previous age. She felt that
the compositions of Schumann and Schubert were the language that had
always been imprisoned in her heart, that could never reach her lips,
but that she now heard, by a miracle, freed and in its perfection.

When the concert was over, she could hardly prevent herself from
joining the women who surged toward the author of those sounds, as if
impelled by an inexora