ed the company an extemporaneous
criticism of Ivan's music, which he tore into miscroscopic bits, and
flung upon the winds of sarcasm; after which he perorated elaborately
upon his own power and the perfect academic accuracy of his style.

When he had reached his final period, the silence was awe-inspiring.
Avelallement, his wife, even Grieg, who was an enthusiastic admirer of
Ivan's work, sat dumb with apprehension, quite oblivious of the fact
that Ivan, appreciating the solemnity of the occasion, was silent only
because he was struggling with hardly repressible laughter. He had
diminished this to a smile, however, before he helped himself
bountifully to wiener-schnitzel, and remarked, with an air of anxious
deference:

"It is a privilege to have heard your views, Herr Professor. In my youth
I, too, was a worshipper of the mathematical cult. I should doubtless
have compressed myself into that mould had it been possible. But alas!
My stubborn inner self would not permit.--After all, each to his own. To
me, imagination: the great, melancholy harmonies of the infinite
Steppes. To you, your counterpoint, your fugue, the infallible,
unquestionable sequence of one-two-three. Let us not quarrel, then, over
the inevitable."

Brahms frowned. But alas! for the moment, his mouth was full. And Madame
Avelallement, breathing a prayer of thanks and relief to Ivan, had
seized her instant and turned the conversation to safer paths. Some
hours later the two masters parted, in perfect amicability. But it is to
be noted that they never met again.

The dour criticism of the rigid classicist was almost the only adverse
word spoken of Ivan throughout his triumphal tour. To be sure, it was
frequently said that his conducting was by no means equal to his
composing: but that was a truth which could have hurt only had it been
turned round. Ivan laughed many a time over his unconquerable terror of
dais and baton; and had not the orchestras he conducted been perfectly
drilled in his programs before his coming, he might more than once have
come to grief. But it was noticeable that wherever Ivan came into
personal contact with the journalists, no praise was afterwards too high
for him. For the magnetism of his personality had increased with the
years; and, added to the absence of any conceit in his manner, it made
him an object of adulation that drove him into frequent fits of contrary
taciturnity.

However, the long years of loneliness and u