rfect ease
induced by the well-chosen dinner this added a little tingling through
all Sylvia's nerves, a pleasant, light, bright titillation.

All might have gone well if, after the dinner, Felix had not stepped,
as was his wont, to the piano. Sylvia had been, up to that moment,
almost wholly young animal, given over to bodily ecstasy, of which not
the least was the agreeable warmth on her silk-clad ankle as she held
her slippered foot to the fire.

But at the first chords something else in her, slowly, with extreme
pain, awoke to activity. All her life music had spoken a language to
which she could not shut her ears, and now--her face clouded, she
shifted her position, she held up a little painted screen to shield
her face from the fire, she finally rose and walked restlessly about
the room. Every grave and haunting cadence from the piano brought to
her mind, flickering and quick, like fire, a darting question, and
every one she stamped out midway, with an effort of the will.

The intimacy between Felix and Aunt Victoria, it was strange she had
never before thought--of course not--what a hideous idea! That book,
back in Lydford, with Horace Gilbert's name on the fly-leaf, and Aunt
Victoria's cool, casual voice as she explained, "Oh, just a young
architect who used to--" Oh, the man in the Pantheon was simply
brutalized by drugs; he did not know what he was saying. His cool,
spectral laugh of sanity sounded faintly in her ears again.

And then, out of a mounting foam of arpeggios, there bloomed for her
a new idea, solid enough, broad enough, high enough, for a refuge
against all these wolfish fangs. She sat down to think it out, hot on
the trail of an answer, the longed-for answer.

It had just occurred to her that there was no possible logical
connection between any of those skulking phantoms and the golden
lovely things they tried to defile. Even if some people of wealth
and ease and leisure were not as careful about moral values as about
colors, and aesthetic harmonies--that meant nothing. The connection
was purely fortuitous. How silly she had been not to see that. Grant,
for purposes of argument, that Aunt Victoria was self-centered and
had lived her life with too little regard for its effect on other
people,--grant even that Felix had, under an almost overpowering
temptation, not kept in a matter of conduct the same rigid nicety of
fastidiousness which characterized his judgment of marbles--what of
it? That