as "high-class parlor pieces for the home." In fact, she felt it to be a
grievance that my lightness should be better paid than the Professor's
learning. In which she was no doubt right!

Ever since my return from my newly purchased farm in Connecticut,
however, I had not been working for money or popular approval, but for
my own pleasure. There was a Work upon which I spent only special hours
of delicious leisure and infinite labor. It held all that was forbidden
to popular compositions; depth and sorrow and dissonances dearer than
harmony. I called it a Symphony Polynesian, and I had spent years in
study of barbaric music, instruments and kindred things that this
love-child of mine might be more richly clothed by a tone or a fancy.
Aunt Caroline had interrupted, this morning, at a very point of
achievement toward which I had been working through the usual
alternations of enjoyment and exasperation, elevation and dejection that
attend most workmen. Pausing only to set my alarm-clock, I hurried into
recording what I had found, in the tangible form of paper and ink.

I always set the alarm-clock when I have an engagement, warned by dire
experiences.

Aunt Caroline had summoned me about eleven in the morning. When the
strident voice of the clock again aroused me, I had just time to dress
and reach the Grand Central by half-past four. I recognized that I was
hungry, that the vicinity was snowed over with sheets of paper, that the
piano keys had acquired another inkstain, and my pipe had charred
another black spot on the desk top. Well, it had been a good day; and
Phillida's tea would have to be my belated luncheon or early dinner.
Even so, it was necessary to make haste.

It was in that haste of making ready that I uncovered the braid of
glittering hair which I had brought from Connecticut. I use no
exaggeration when I say it glittered. It did; each hair was lustrous
with a peculiar, shining vitality, and crinkled slightly along its full
length. With a renewed self-reproach at sight of its humbled exile and
captivity, I took up the trophy of my one adventure. While I am without
much experience, such a quantity seemed unusual. Also, I had not known
such a mass of hair could be so soft and supple in the hand. My mother
and little sister died before I can remember; and while I have many good
friends, I have none intimate enough to educate me in such matters.
Perhaps a consciousness of that trifling physical disadvantage of