y to-night."

"Yes, and whose fault is it? I told you not to take two helpings of that
beef."

"No, no, dear snip, it is not indigestion, but rather it is that music,
which is plaguing me."

"Now, Manuel, how can music bother anybody! I am sure the boy plays his
violin very nicely indeed, especially when you consider his age."

Said Manuel:

"Yes, but the long low sobbing of the violin, troubling as the vague
thoughts begotten by that season wherein summer is not yet perished from
the earth, but lingers wanly in the tattered shrines of summer, speaks
of what was and of what might have been. A blind desire, the same which
on warm moonlit nights was used to shake like fever in the veins of a
boy whom I remember, is futilely plaguing a gray fellow with the gray
wraiths of innumerable old griefs and with small stinging memories of
long-dead delights. Such thirsting breeds no good for staid and aging
men, but my lips are athirst for lips whose loveliness no longer exists
in flesh, and I thirst for a dead time and its dead fervors to be
reviving, so that young Manuel may love again.

"To-night now surely somewhere, while this music sets uncertain and
probing fingers to healed wounds, an aging woman, in everything a
stranger to me, is troubled just thus futilely, and she too remembers
what she half forgets. 'We that of old were one, and shuddered heart to
heart, with our young lips and our souls too made indivisible,'--thus
she is thinking, as I think--'has life dealt candidly in leaving us to
potter with half measures and to make nothing of severed lives that
shrivel far apart?' Yes, she to-night is sad as I, it well may be; but I
cannot rest certain of this, because there is in young love a glory so
bedazzling as to prevent the lover from seeing clearly his
co-worshipper, and therefore in that dear time when we served love
together I learned no more of her than she of me.

"Of all my failures this is bitterest to bear, that out of so much
grieving and aspiring I have gained no assured knowledge of the woman
herself, but must perforce become lachrymose over such perished tinsels
as her quivering red lips and shining hair! Of youth and love is there
no more, then, to be won than virginal breasts and a small white belly
yielded to the will of the lover, and brief drunkenness, and afterward
such puzzled yearning as now dies into acquiescence, very much as the
long low sobbing of that violin yonder dies into stillness now