ink butterflies sported in a once blue-silk garden. Then coffee, rolls,
and honey, and back again to work, with little Scatchett at the piano in
the salon beyond the partition, wearing a sweater and fingerless gloves
and holding a hot-water bottle on her knees. Three rooms beyond, down
the stone hall, the Big Soprano, doing Madama Butterfly in bad German,
helped to make an encircling wall of sound in the center of which one
might practice peacefully.

Only the Portier objected. Morning after morning, crawling out at dawn
from under his featherbed in the lodge below, he opened his door and
listened to Harmony doing penance above; and morning after morning he
shook his fist up the stone staircase.

"Gott im Himmel!" he would say to his wife, fumbling with the knot of
his mustache bandage, "what a people, these Americans! So much noise and
no music!"

"And mad!" grumbled his wife. "All the day coal, coal to heat; and at
night the windows open! Karl the milkboy has seen it."

And now the little colony was breaking up. The Big Soprano was going
back to her church, grand opera having found no place for her. Scatch
was returning to be married, her heart full, indeed, of music, but her
head much occupied with the trousseau in her trunks. The Harmar sisters
had gone two weeks before, their funds having given out. Indeed, funds
were very low with all of them. The "Bitte zum speisen" of the little
German maid often called them to nothing more opulent than a stew of
beef and carrots.

Not that all had been sordid. The butter had gone for opera tickets, and
never was butter better spent. And there had been gala days--a fruitcake
from Harmony's mother, a venison steak at Christmas, and once or twice
on birthdays real American ice cream at a fabulous price and worth it.
Harmony had bought a suit, too, a marvel of tailoring and cheapness, and
a willow plume that would have cost treble its price in New York. Oh,
yes, gala days, indeed, to offset the butter and the rainy winter and
the faltering technic and the anxiety about money. For that they all
had always, the old tragedy of the American music student abroad--the
expensive lessons, the delays in getting to the Master himself, the
contention against German greed or Austrian whim. And always back in
one's mind the home people, to whom one dares not confess that after
nine months of waiting, or a year, one has seen the Master once or not
at all.

Or--and one of the Harmar girls