In the morning she walked in the garden, drenched in sunshine,
enveloped in the silence of the lake, beyond which she saw, far away,
other villas nestling at the bases of the mountains. A sensation of
humility came to her. Amid that great panorama of blue and gold she
seemed to perceive subtle traces of a beneficent divinity. The
sunshine veiled the hawks that were soaring through the sky in quest of
weaker birds; the waters of the lake concealed the fishes that were
devouring one another; and when, with a timid and pleading naivete, she
paused before a rosebush, she did not see, behind those petals, the
spiders spinning their traps.

As she returned toward the house, there stole over her a pleasant
weakness, a childlike and tremulous trust; and she felt the soft air
more keenly, smelled more delicate fragrances, heard a multitude of
infinitesimal sounds that had not reached her ears a moment ago.

She sat in a high-ceiled, white-walled room with French windows opening
on a terrace where _olea fragans_ blossoms expanded round the base of a
statue by Canova. At last a feeling of incompleteness penetrated her
languor. She rose to pace the mosaic floor on which appeared a design
of mermaids and tritons.

"What shall I do now? I must fill my life with something. I must find
some way to occupy my mind."

She thought of mastering another language; for like many persons of
similar temperament she found the learning of foreign tongues a simple
matter. But what language? Already she knew French, Italian, and
German. Russian, then?

She recoiled from that thought, associated as it was with Anna Zanidov.

Sitting down at the piano, she played Chopin.

Her interpretation of the piece was good, but not eloquent. The spirit
that she had heard certain musicians put into it was lacking. She
remembered how differently even old Brantome, the expatriated French
critic, had expressed these phrases. She wondered why, with her
immense passion for music, she had never been able to translate its
profoundest spirit.

And she recalled an old longing of hers to compose some musical
masterpiece. For that purpose she had faithfully studied harmony,
counterpoint, fugue, and musical form, had steeped herself in the works
of the masters from Palestrina to Stravinsky. Yet her own creative
efforts had ended in platitudes. Was it true that women, supposed to
be more emotional than men, were incapable of employing successfully
t