ncerity which was
Page's hallmark never failed to arrest her attention, a little to
arouse her wonder, and occasionally, for a reason that she did not
like to dwell upon, somewhat to abash her. The reason was that he
never spoke for effect, and she often did. He was not speaking for
effect now: he seemed scarcely even to be speaking to her, rather to
be musingly formulating something for his own enlightenment. He
went on. "The fact is that there _is_ no sense to be made out of my
situation in life. I am like a man with a fine voice, who has no ear."

He showed surprise that Sylvia failed to follow this, and explained.
"I mean the voice is no good to that kind of a man, it's no good to
anybody. It's the craziest, accidental affair anyhow, haven't you ever
noticed it?--who draws the fine voices. Half the time--more than half
the time, _most_ of the time it seems to me when I've been recently to
a lot of concerts, the people who have the voices haven't any other
qualifications for being singers. And it's so with coal-mines, with
everything else that's inherited. For five years now I've given up
what I'd like to do, and I've tried, under the best _maestri_ I could
find, to make something out of my voice, so to speak. And it's no
go. It's in the nature of things that I can't make a go of it.
Over everything I do lies the taint that I'm the 'owner'! They are
suspicious of me, always will be--and rightly so. Anybody else not
connected with the mediaeval idea of 'possession' could do better than
I. The whole relation's artificial. I'm in it for the preposterous
reason that my father, operating on Wall Street, made a lucky
guess,--as though I should be called upon to run a locomotive because
my middle initial is L!"

Sylvia still felt the same slight sense of flatness when this
recurring topic thrust itself into a personal talk; but during the
last month she had adjusted herself to Page so that this no longer
showed on the surface. She was indeed quite capable of taking an
interest in the subject, as soon as she could modulate herself into
the new key. "Yes, of course," she agreed, "it's like so many other
things that are perfectly necessary to go on with, perfectly absurd
when you look closely at them. My father nearly lost his position once
for saying that all inheritance was wrong. But even he never had
the slightest suggestion as to what to do about it, how to get an
inheritance into the hands of the people who might make