e for battery and breach of the peace. I have known a few
musicians in my time, Beatrix, and I know their pleasant little ways."

They had joined the large group gathered at the head of the music-room,
and were slowly working their way from the outer fringe to the focal
point. As they waited, now advancing a step, then halting again, Beatrix
listened in some scorn to the fugue of praise which rose about her, a
fugue composed chiefly of adjectives heaped in confusion about the
single, magical noun _temperament_. She shot a mischievous glance up at
her tall cousin.

"Fancy any man having to live up to this sort of thing, Bobby! _Divine_
and _perfectly elegant_ do not suggest the same set of attributes, and I
don't see how he can strike the golden mean between them. Somebody
really ought to coin a new word for such emergencies as this."

Before her cousin could answer, the woman just ahead of them had buried
the singer's hand in her own pudgy clasp.

"Oh, Mr. Thayer, that was such a pretty piece you sang last! It was a
German piece; wasn't it? It was just sweet!"

And it was after such a prelude that Beatrix bowed in recognition of her
cousin's introduction. Even as she bowed, there came a swift realization
that she was facing no anticlimax. And yet the man before her was in no
wise the typical musician. Tall, so tall that Bobby Dane, five feet ten
in his stockings, seemed short beside him, well-dressed, well-groomed,
he looked far more like a prosperous, alert man of affairs than an
artist or a dreamer. Moreover, in spite of certain lines in his face, he
was absurdly boyish to have sung those great songs. He could know
nothing of the real issues of fate with which he had been juggling,
could have no real conception of either hope or disappointment.
Doubtless he had developed his _Weltschmerz_ mechanically, imitatively,
at so many marks or _lire_ an hour.

Beatrix had always been distressed by the flatness of her one-syllabled
name. It gained a new roundness now; and she raised her eyes, as Thayer
spoke it, to meet the gray ones above her. They were clear and steady
eyes, smiling, yet with a look in their depths which to her mind
accounted for the insistent, troubled note in his singing. The lines
about his shaven lips were firm, but mobile.

Bobby eyed the two of them quizzically. Then he broke in upon the
tentative conversation which follows an introduction.

"Pass, Beatrix! That's quite original. I told my cousi