ver
helped her before.

She almost never worked now with the sunny, happy contentment that had
filled the hours when she worked with Wunsch--"like a fat horse turning
a sorgum mill," she said bitterly to herself. Then, by sticking to it,
she could always do what she set out to do. Now, everything that she
really wanted was impossible; a CANTABILE like Harsanyi's, for instance,
instead of her own cloudy tone. No use telling her she might have it in
ten years. She wanted it now. She wondered how she had ever found other
things interesting: books, "Anna Karenina"--all that seemed so unreal
and on the outside of things. She was not born a musician, she decided;
there was no other way of explaining it.

Sometimes she got so nervous at the piano that she left it, and
snatching up her hat and cape went out and walked, hurrying through the
streets like Christian fleeing from the City of Destruction. And while
she walked she cried. There was scarcely a street in the neighborhood
that she had not cried up and down before that winter was over. The
thing that used to lie under her cheek, that sat so warmly over her
heart when she glided away from the sand hills that autumn morning, was
far from her. She had come to Chicago to be with it, and it had deserted
her, leaving in its place a painful longing, an unresigned despair.

Harsanyi knew that his interesting pupil--"the savage blonde," one of
his male students called her--was sometimes very unhappy. He saw in her
discontent a curious definition of character. He would have said that a
girl with so much musical feeling, so intelligent, with good training of
eye and hand, would, when thus suddenly introduced to the great
literature of the piano, have found boundless happiness. But he soon
learned that she was not able to forget her own poverty in the richness
of the world he opened to her. Often when he played to her, her face was
the picture of restless misery. She would sit crouching forward, her
elbows on her knees, her brows drawn together and her gray-green eyes
smaller than ever, reduced to mere pin-points of cold, piercing light.
Sometimes, while she listened, she would swallow hard, two or three
times, and look nervously from left to right, drawing her shoulders
together. "Exactly," he thought, "as if she were being watched, or as if
she were naked and heard some one coming."

On the other hand, when she came several times to see Mrs. Harsanyi and
the two babies, she wa