We must not have her often. If I did not
have my living to make, then--" he dropped into a chair and closed his
eyes. "How tired I am. What a voice!"

IV

AFTER that evening Thea's work with Harsanyi changed somewhat. He
insisted that she should study some songs with him, and after almost
every lesson he gave up half an hour of his own time to practicing them
with her. He did not pretend to know much about voice production, but so
far, he thought, she had acquired no really injurious habits. A healthy
and powerful organ had found its own method, which was not a bad one. He
wished to find out a good deal before he recommended a vocal teacher. He
never told Thea what he thought about her voice, and made her general
ignorance of anything worth singing his pretext for the trouble he took.
That was in the beginning. After the first few lessons his own pleasure
and hers were pretext enough. The singing came at the end of the lesson
hour, and they both treated it as a form of relaxation.

Harsanyi did not say much even to his wife about his discovery. He
brooded upon it in a curious way. He found that these unscientific
singing lessons stimulated him in his own study. After Miss Kronborg
left him he often lay down in his studio for an hour before dinner, with
his head full of musical ideas, with an effervescence in his brain which
he had sometimes lost for weeks together under the grind of teaching. He
had never got so much back for himself from any pupil as he did from
Miss Kronborg. From the first she had stimulated him; something in her
personality invariably affected him. Now that he was feeling his way
toward her voice, he found her more interesting than ever before. She
lifted the tedium of the winter for him, gave him curious fancies and
reveries. Musically, she was sympathetic to him. Why all this was true,
he never asked himself. He had learned that one must take where and when
one can the mysterious mental irritant that rouses one's imagination;
that it is not to be had by order. She often wearied him, but she never
bored him. Under her crudeness and brusque hardness, he felt there was a
nature quite different, of which he never got so much as a hint except
when she was at the piano, or when she sang. It was toward this hidden
creature that he was trying, for his own pleasure, to find his way. In
short, Harsanyi looked forward to his hour with Thea for the same reason
that poor Wunsch had sometimes dreaded hi