ways stimulated him at first, and then vastly
wearied him. The machinery was always pounding away in this man, and
Wilson preferred companions of a more reflective habit of mind. He could
not help feeling that there were unreasoning and unreasonable activities
going on in Alexander all the while; that even after dinner, when most
men achieve a decent impersonality, Bartley had merely closed the door
of the engine-room and come up for an airing. The machinery itself was
still pounding on.

Bartley's abstraction and Wilson's reflections were cut short by a
rustle at the door, and almost before they could rise Mrs. Alexander was
standing by the hearth. Alexander brought a chair for her, but she shook
her head.

"No, dear, thank you. I only came in to see whether you and Professor
Wilson were quite comfortable. I am going down to the music-room."

"Why not practice here? Wilson and I are growing very dull. We are tired
of talk."

"Yes, I beg you, Mrs. Alexander," Wilson began, but he got no further.

"Why, certainly, if you won't find me too noisy. I am working on the
Schumann `Carnival,' and, though I don't practice a great many hours,
I am very methodical," Mrs. Alexander explained, as she crossed to an
upright piano that stood at the back of the room, near the windows.

Wilson followed, and, having seen her seated, dropped into a chair
behind her. She played brilliantly and with great musical feeling.
Wilson could not imagine her permitting herself to do anything badly,
but he was surprised at the cleanness of her execution. He wondered how
a woman with so many duties had managed to keep herself up to a standard
really professional. It must take a great deal of time, certainly, and
Bartley must take a great deal of time. Wilson reflected that he had
never before known a woman who had been able, for any considerable
while, to support both a personal and an intellectual passion. Sitting
behind her, he watched her with perplexed admiration, shading his eyes
with his hand. In her dinner dress she looked even younger than in
street clothes, and, for all her composure and self-sufficiency, she
seemed to him strangely alert and vibrating, as if in her, too, there
were something never altogether at rest. He felt that he knew pretty
much what she demanded in people and what she demanded from life, and he
wondered how she squared Bartley. After ten years she must know him;
and however one took him, however much one admired h