But she did not. She was grave. She was gay. She showed him her _cloisonné_ and her ivories, her etchings and her Sargent, she played to him, and she sang a little. She flattered him, and she gave him some rare dole of subtle petting, but she did no wooing, and seemed inclined to brook none.
What a woman! She set him to thinking. And he thought.
Next to his profession, in which he was deeply absorbed—but not narrowly so, for this dapper, good-looking man was a great physician, and not in-the-making—Horace Latham cared more for music, and needed it more, than he did for anything else—even pictures. All that was most personal to him, all that was strongest and finest in him, quivered and glowed quickest, surest, longest, at the side of a dissecting table, and to the sound of music, violin-sweetness, harp-magic, the song of a piano, the invocation of an organ, the lyric lure of a voice.
But it had to be good music. Helen played prettily, and bored him. Hugh was everlastingly discoursing rag-time with his two first fingers, and Latham itched to chloroform him.
He had never heard Mrs. Hilary attempt music. And when, after lunch, uninvited she sat down at her piano he winced.
She played wonderfully. What a surprising woman! She played Greig to him and Chopin, and then she sang just twice: “Oft in the Stilly Night”—his mother had sung that to him in the dear long-ago, and then a quaint pathetic darky melody that he had never heard before.
“No more—to-day,” she told him, “enough is better than too much feast.”
“Do you like Stephen Pryde?” she demanded abruptly, closing the piano.
She accepted the evasion, or rather, to be more exact, spared him putting its admission into cruder wording.
“Well—you’re wrong. You’re all wrong. I like him. No one else does, except Hugh, and Hugh doesn’t count. But I do: and I like Stephen Pryde immensely.”
“You certainly do count, very much,” Latham told her emphatically. And she did not contradict him by so much as a gesture of her ring-covered hands or a lift of the straight black eyebrows. “Why doesn’t Hugh count?” he asked.
“Because he likes every one. The people who like every one never do count. It is silly. It’s too silly. Now, Stephen Pryde does no such thing.”
