delight, the
delicate transparency of the pure Carrara against the soft violet of the
hangings behind her and the shadowy black at her feet. Finally, when the
thin, fragrant smoke had begun to fill the room with its soft haze, he
took the golden tube from its place on the pedestal, and prepared for
himself the largest dose of the narcotic that he had ever dreamed of
taking. After that he returned, quietly, to his piano.

Darkness had nearly come, and the unlighted music-room was lapped in a
pleasant twilight, broken only by the faint gleam from the candles,
which entered through the open doorway. The odor of the incense was
everywhere; and the mystic scent and warmth of the inner air contrasted
well with the shrieking of the demon-ridden wind outside the house. The
atmosphere perfectly suited Ivan's state of mind. All anxiety about the
concert had gone. Some inkling of success floated through his brain; but
the matter now seemed infinitesimally small. The world, with its
struggling millions of unknown men and women, was farther away from him
now than the shadowland of the departed. For he was almost face to face
with the problem of Eternity.

Alas! In the life he knew, how small a part did justice, that law innate
in every human heart, play? How much less seemed the justice of God
towards his creatures, good and bad, than the justice, or the pity, of
these creatures for one another? It was this feeling which had generated
that deep, all-pervading sense of injury, that anger with and distrust
of the Almighty, that had thrown Ivan into his revolt. And who was to
explain why we are left in the world without any knowledge of whence and
whither; knowing only that from birth till death we are surrounded by
evil:--evil rewarded; good defiled, disgraced; yet mankind still under
the command of man and of God to walk straightly, in fear of promised
damnation? It was the question he had asked in his "Tosca Symphony":
that symphony of helpless, human wonder and sorrow. And the question,
repeated for the last time in the great _motif_ of the _finale_, was
still unanswered.

He sat, now, drearily playing fragments of various works, his brain
teeming with memories: of his mother, in her sweetness and purity, bound
for life to the brute force that had crushed her youth away in the first
days of her married life; of Nathalie and her husband, the husband who
had been the--admirer--of her own mother; of that shadowy Princess whose
grav