lies is that one should only quote well. If
it wasn't that I'm not sure of the words, and that I can't verify
them, I should confound you with a citation from Disraeli."

"Go on," said Adam, lazily; "I don't mind being crushed."

"It is to the effect that people think that where there is no
quotation there must be great originality. Then he says, 'the greater
part of our writers, in consequence, have become so original that no
one cares to imitate them; and those who never quote are seldom
quoted.' That's about it. Now are you answered?" She laughed
gleefully. "It is delicious to disagree with you. I had almost
forgotten that it was possible."

He echoed her laugh with the carefree heartiness of a boy. "I am going
to make a riddle," he said. "Prepare yourself; this is the first
conundrum of the new world. Why is it better to disagree than to
differ?"

She made a little grimace. "It's a wonder the Sphinx does not rise
from the other side of the world and eat you," she said with derision.
"Anybody who loved anybody could answer such a poor little excuse for
a riddle as that; besides, it sounds like an extract from somebody's
'First Easy Lessons in Rhetoric.' Don't you see that I can disagree
_with_ you, while I must differ _from_ you? That is too disgracefully
easy. Indeed, Adam, that riddle of yours brings back every doubt, for
they say--scientists and ologists and learned people, you know--that
there is hope for delinquents and defectives, but none for
degenerates, and that is an awfully degenerate joke."

"Play for me," he said, "and don't call names."

She lifted the bow and drew it across the strings in a series of
cadences so wildly mournful that he shuddered. She put the bow down,
and laid her hand upon the strings to still them. In the old days she
had been given to sudden changes of mood, but of late she had been
almost serene.

"What is it?" he asked gently.

"Oh, nothing,--everything! I was thinking of another thing which those
wise ones said," she answered, with more bitterness than she had shown
for many months. "It was that word 'degenerate' brought it back. You
know birds are a very low order of being, a branch of the reptile
family, in truth, and I have heard people say that musicians are
generally lacking in something. They either have no moral or financial
sense, and cannot be bound by ordinary rules. And I am musical to the
very tips of my fingers. It is as if I could hear the song of the
sil