th him. But that I might
have known. I can have nothing in common with a man who is not to be
impressed by music."

"I love him quite as well," said Emilia. "He is a quick friend. I am
always certain of him."

"And I imagine also that you are quits with your quick friend," added
Sir Purcell. "You do not care for verse, or he for voices!"

"Poetry?" said Emilia; "no, not much. It seems like talking on tiptoe;
like animals in cages, always going to one end and back again...."

"And making the same noise when they get at the end--like the bears!"
Sir Purcell slightly laughed. "You don't approve of the rhymes?"

"Yes, I like the rhymes; but when you use words--I mean, if you are
in earnest--how can you count and have stops, and--no, I do not care
anything for poetry."

Sir Purcell's opinion of Emilia, though he liked her, was, that if a
genius, she was an incomplete one; and his positive judgement (which
I set down in phrase that would have startled him) ranked both her and
Tracy as a pair of partial humbugs, entertaining enough. They were both
too real for him.

Haply at that moment the girl was intensely susceptible, for she chilled
by his side; and when he left her she begged Madame to walk fast. "I
wonder whether I have a cold!" she said.

Madame explained all the signs of it with tragic minuteness, deciding
that Emilia was free at present, and by miracle, from this English
scourge; but Emilia kept her hands at her mouth. Over the hornbeam hedge
of the lane that ran through the market-gardens, she could see a murky
sunset spreading its deep-coloured lines, that seemed to her really
like a great sorrowing over earth. It had never seemed so till now; and,
entering the house, the roar of vehicles in a neighbouring road sounded
like something implacable in the order of things among us, and clung
about her ears pitilessly. Running upstairs, she tried a scale of notes
that broke on a cough. "Did I cough purposely?" she asked herself;
but she had not the courage to try the notes again. While dressing she
hummed a passage, and sought stealthily to pass the barrier of her own
watchfulness by dwelling on a deep note, from which she was to rise
bursting with full bravura energy, and so forth on a tide of song. But
her breath failed. She stared into the glass and forced the note. A
panic caught at her heart when she heard the sound that issued. "Am
I ill? I must be hungry!" she exclaimed. "It is a cough! But I don't
cough