attention
mocked her with its futility.

She and Paul had been married for eight months, but they had found no
time for the serious study of music from which she had hoped so much.
When Paul was at home for an evening he was too tired and worn for
anything very deep, he said, and preferred to anything else the lighter
pieces of Nevin. She now gave ear despairingly to the mighty utterance
of a master, catching only now and then a tantalizing glimpse of what it
might mean to her. At times, there emerged from the glorious tumult of
sound some grave, earnest chord, some quick, piercing melody, some
exquisite sudden cadence, which reached her heart intelligibly; but
through most of it she felt herself to be listening with heartsick
yearning to a lovely message in an unknown tongue. Her feeling of
desolate exile from a realm of beauty she longed to enter, was
intensified, as was natural in so sensitive a nature, by the strange
power of music to heighten in its listeners whatever is, for the time,
their predominant emotion. She felt like crying out, like beating her
hands against the prison bars suddenly revealed to her. She was almost
intolerably affected before the end of the selection.

"That's an awfully long piece for anybody to learn by heart!" commented
her neighbor admiringly, as the old pianist finished, and stood up
wiping his forehead. "Say, Mr. Burkhardt, what's the name of that
selection?" he went on, leaning forward.

The old German turned toward him, and answered gravely: "That is the
feerst mofement of Beethoven's Opus Von Hundred and Elefen."

"Oh, it is, is it?" said Lydia's guest, with a facetious intonation.
"All of that?"

After that the soprano sang again, someone else sang a humorous negro
song, there was more piano music, rendered by the prosperous son of the
old pianist, who played dashingly some bright comic-opera airs. The
furniture was pushed back and a few dancers whirled over the costly,
hardwood waxed floors, which Lydia had cleaned that morning. She felt
vaguely that everyone was being most kind and that her good-natured
guests were trying to make up for the failure of the dinner by unusual
efforts to have the evening pass off well. She was very grateful for
this humane disposition of theirs. It was the bright spot of the
experience.

But Paul, who also saw the kindly efforts of his guests, felt that this
was the last intolerable dagger-thrust. Their amused compassion
suffocated him. He