"But even then? You can put into your picture none of the workings of the human mind, none of the aspirations of the human soul. When you have a great happiness or a great sorrow, does it help you to paint your pictures? No, no, your painting is apart from your existence, your mind has no place there. In the future we shall have but one art, and that art will be music!"
"Oh, Mr. Raleigh!" laughed the girl, "you are making a world for one kind of people. What will happen to the poor luckless ones like myself who are not musical? I suppose there will have to be some in your world?"
"Je n'en vois pas la nécessité," said the musician, relaxing into a laugh too; but Mrs. Routh, who had never read Voltaire, thought it was quite time to interfere when she could not even understand what they were saying, and she dropped her parasol. Digby stooped to pick it up, and she asked him promptly to play something.
The spell was broken, and the chorus round the room echoed the request. The musician smiled in a forced manner, and said he would play the thirty-seven variations of Beethoven.
"Oh, no, something of your own," begged the chorus.
"Yes, please, Mr. Raleigh, something full of the workings of the human mind and the aspirations of the human soul," said the girl, merrily; and as the musician sat down and began to play, she again shocked everybody by walking round the room and examining the photographs.
"How exquisite, how emotional!" cried the easily moved Mrs. Reginald when he had finished.
"Is he not bound to get on?" said the other upholders of altruism. But the musician did not seem to hear them, for he crossed over to the girl by the bookshelves.
"Now tell me," she said, hardly lowering her voice, "is it possible to compose anything that would express the aspirations of Mrs. Reginald Routh's soul? That is she, is it not, the one in the black silk who glares at me and is so maternal to you? Oh, I shall never understand the language of music; I wonder if you find the language of painting as difficult, and if that is why you have acquired such an unflattering opinion of it?"
"May it not be because I have as yet seen none of your sketches?" he said gallantly; but she shrugged her shoulders and turned away.