tered away; or
hard-mouthed women who laid down the law and knew more than you did.
There was only one quality in a woman that appealed to him--charm;
and the quieter it was, the more he liked it. And this one had charm,
shadowy as afternoon sunlight on those Italian hills and valleys he had
loved. The feeling, too, that she was, as it were, apart, cloistered,
made her seem nearer to himself, a strangely desirable companion. When
a man is very old and quite out of the running, he loves to feel secure
from the rivalries of youth, for he would still be first in the heart
of beauty. And he drank his hock, and watched her lips, and felt nearly
young. But the dog Balthasar lay watching her lips too, and despising
in his heart the interruptions of their talk, and the tilting of those
greenish glasses full of a golden fluid which was distasteful to him.

The light was just failing when they went back into the music-room. And,
cigar in mouth, old Jolyon said:

"Play me some Chopin."

By the cigars they smoke, and the composers they love, ye shall know
the texture of men's souls. Old Jolyon could not bear a strong cigar
or Wagner's music. He loved Beethoven and Mozart, Handel and Gluck, and
Schumann, and, for some occult reason, the operas of Meyerbeer; but of
late years he had been seduced by Chopin, just as in painting he
had succumbed to Botticelli. In yielding to these tastes he had been
conscious of divergence from the standard of the Golden Age. Their
poetry was not that of Milton and Byron and Tennyson; of Raphael and
Titian; Mozart and Beethoven. It was, as it were, behind a veil; their
poetry hit no one in the face, but slipped its fingers under the ribs
and turned and twisted, and melted up the heart. And, never certain
that this was healthy, he did not care a rap so long as he could see the
pictures of the one or hear the music of the other.

Irene sat down at the piano under the electric lamp festooned with
pearl-grey, and old Jolyon, in an armchair, whence he could see her,
crossed his legs and drew slowly at his cigar. She sat a few moments
with her hands on the keys, evidently searching her mind for what to
give him. Then she began and within old Jolyon there arose a sorrowful
pleasure, not quite like anything else in the world. He fell slowly into
a trance, interrupted only by the movements of taking the cigar out of
his mouth at long intervals, and replacing it. She was there, and the
hock within him, and th