and as
rich sources of melody and harmony as the ordinary major scale, for
modern music limited itself to the major scale, the minor scale being a
dependency. The major and minor modes or scales had sufficed for two or
three centuries of music, but the time of their exhaustion was
approaching, and the musicians of the future would have to return to the
older scales. He refused to admit that they did not lend themselves to
modulation, and he answered, when Evelyn suggested that the introduction
of a sharp or a flat was likely to alter the character of the ancient
scales, that she must not judge the ancient scales by what had already
been written in them; it was nowise his intention to imitate the
character of the plain chant melodies; she must not confuse the
sentiment of these melodies with the modes in which they were written.
It might be that in adding a sharp or a flat the musician destroyed the
character of the mode which he was leaving and that of the mode he was
passing into, but that proved nothing except his want of skill. His
opera was written not only in the three ancient modes, but also in the
ordinary major and minor scales, and he believed that he had enlarged
the limits of musical expression.

He was not the first young man she had met with schemes for writing
original music. So far as she was capable of judging, his practice was
better than his theory. But his music was not the origin of her interest
for him. What really interested her were his beliefs; her personal
interest in him had really begun when he had said that he believed in a
continuous revelation. Of this revelation he had argued that Christ was
only a part. These ideas, which she heard for the first time, especially
interested her. Owen's agnosticism had given her freedom and command of
this world, but it had made a great loneliness in her life which Owen
was no longer able to fill. Life seemed a desert without some form of
belief, and notwithstanding her success, her life was often intolerably
lonely. She had often thought of the world's flowers and fruits as mere
semblance of things without true reality, and what seemed a bountiful
garden, a mere hard, dry, brilliant desert. It was only at certain
moments, of course, that she thought these things, but sometimes these
thoughts quite unexpectedly came upon her, and she could no longer
conceal from herself the fact that she was lonely in her soul, and that
she was growing lonelier. She was we