d episodes. I remember perfectly that
in certain passages the quintett was reduced to a duet by employing the
unison, but the effects produced by the difference in the tone of the
instruments was something marvellous! I cannot recall anything the least
like it in other instrumental compositions.'

She discussed music with all the subtlety of a true connoisseur, and in
describing the sentiments aroused in her by some particular composition,
or the entire work of a master, she expressed herself most felicitously.

'I have played and heard a great deal of music,' she said, 'and of every
symphony, every sonata, every nocturne I have a separate and distinct
picture, an impression of shape and colour, of a figure, a group, a
landscape, so that each of my favourite compositions has a name
corresponding to the picture;--for instance, the Sonata of the Forty
Daughters-in-law of Priam; the Nocturne of the Sleeping Beauty in the
Wood, the Gavotte of the Yellow Ladies, the Gigue of the Mill, the
Prelude of the Drops of Water, and so on.'

She laughed softly, a laugh which surprised one with its ineffable grace
on that plaintive mouth.

'You remember, Francesca, the multitude of notes with which we afflicted
the margins of our favourite pieces at school. One day, after a most
serious consultation, we changed the title of every piece of Schumann's
we possessed, and each title had a long explanatory note. I have the
papers still. Now, when I play the _Myrthen_ or the _Albumblaetter_, all
these mysterious annotations are quite incomprehensible to me; my
emotions and my point of view have changed completely, but there is a
delicate pleasure in comparing the sentiments of the present with those
of the past, the new picture and the old. It is a pleasure very similar
to that of re-reading one's diary, only perhaps rather more mournful and
intense. A diary is generally the description of real events, a
chronicle of days happy or otherwise, the gray or rosy traces left by
time in its flight; the notes written in youth on the margin of a piece
of music are, on the contrary, fragments of the secret poems of a soul
that is just breaking into bloom, the lyric effusions of our ideality as
yet untouched, the story of our dreams. What language? What a flow of
words! You remember, Francesca?'

She talked with perfect freedom, even with a touch of spiritual
exaltation, like a person long condemned to intercourse with inferiors,
who has the irres