s of ingenious variations--a prolonged
passacaglia--in which the grace and dexterity of his melodic invention,
contrapuntal skill and symmetrical sense were gratifyingly present.

I was in no flattering vein when I told him he had made a big jump in
his work.

"But, Arthur, why so much in the Brahms manner? Has your wife turned
your love of Shelley to Browning worship?" I jestingly concluded.

"My wife, if she wishes, can turn Shelley into slush," he answered
bitterly. This shocked me. I felt like putting questions, but how could
I? Had I not been one of the many who advised the fellow to marry
Ellenora Bishop? Had we not all fancied that in her strength was his
security, his hope for future artistic triumphs?

He went on as his fingers snatched at fugitive harmonic experimentings:
"It's not all right up town. I wish that you would run up some night.
You've not seen Ellenora for months, and perhaps you could induce her to
put the brake on." I was puzzled. Putting the brake on a woman is always
a risky experiment, especially if she happens to be wedded. Besides,
what did he mean?

"I mean," he replied to my tentative look of inquiry, "that Ellenora is
going down-hill with her artistic theories of literature, and I mean
that she has made our house a devilish unpleasant place to live in."

I hastily promised to call in a few days, and after seeing him to the
door, and bidding him cheer up, I returned to the portrait of Mrs.
Beacon, and felt savage at the noisiness of color and monotony of tonal
values in the picture.

"Good Lord, why will artists marry?" I irritably asked of my subject in
the frame. Her sleek Knickerbocker smile further angered me, and I went
to my club and drank coffee until long after midnight.

II

If, as her friends asserted, Ellenora Vibert's ugliness had softened I
did not notice it. She was one of those few women in the world that
marriage had not improved. Her eyes were colder, more secret; her jaw
crueller, her lips wider and harder at the edges. She welcomed me with
distinguished loftiness, and I soon felt the unpleasant key in which the
household tune was being played. It was amiable enough, this flat near
Mount Morris Park in Harlem. The Viberts had taste, and their music-room
was charming in its reticent scheme of decoration--a Steinway grand
piano, a low crowded book-case with a Rodin cast, a superb mezzotint of
Leonardo's Mona Lisa after Calmatta, revealing the admirable poise of