his 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 the scent of tobacco; but there, too, was a world of
sunshine lingering into moonlight, and pools with storks upon them, and
bluish trees above, glowing with blurs of wine-red roses, and fiel