happiness
we should enter together; and, although I could see him but dimly, so
well did I know every line of his face that I could fancy the little
smile that quivered around his lips and that shone from the depths of
his eyes as Leila played the measures we both loved. I must have been
smiling in answer when the song of the girl outside rose high.

Not until that alien sound struck athwart the power and beauty of the
spell did I come to know how high I had builded my castles; but the
knocking at the gate toppled down the dreams as Leila swept a discord
over the keyboard and crossed to the open window.

In the dusk, as she flung back the heavy curtains, I could see the bulk
of Brompton Oratory set behind the houses like the looming back-drop of
a painted scene. Nearer, in front of a tall house across the way, stood
the singer, a thin girl whose shadowy presence seemed animated by a
curious bravery. In a nasal, plaintive voice she was singing the words
of a ballad of love and of loving that London, as only London can, had
made curiously its own that season. The insistence of her plea--for she
sang as if she cried out her life's longing, sang as if she called on
the passing crowd not for alms, but for understanding--made her for the
moment, before she faded back into oblivion, an artist, voicing the
heartache and the heartbreak of womankind; and the artist in Leila
Burton responded to the thrill.

Until the ending of the song she stood silent in front of the window,
unconscious of the fact that she, and not the scene beyond her, held the
center of the stage. Not for her beauty, although at times Leila Burton
gave the impression of being exquisitely lovely, was she remarkable, but
rather for that receptive attitude that made her an inspired listener.
In me, who had known her for but a little while, she awakened my deepest
and drowsiest ambition, the desire to express in pictures the light and
the shade of the London I knew. With her I could feel the power, and the
glory, and the fear, and the terror of the city as I never did at other
times. It was not alone that she was all things to all men; it was that
she led men and women who knew her to the summits of their aspirations.

Even Standish Burton, big, sullen man that he was, immersed in his
engineering problems, responded to his wife's spiritual charm with a
readiness that always aroused in Dick and myself an admiration for him
that our other knowledge of him did not