--dukes, debts and
diseases seem synonymous; you are not only clever, but you have the one
gift, saving the title, that commends these creatures to our girls."

He smiled his inscrutable smile and bowed. "And that is?"

"You seem to have found the lost art of making pretty speeches, and
paying a woman the small attentions that we all like so well. If I were
a man," went on this dreadful dame, "I should never forget to kiss my
wife and send her flowers and remember all the family anniversaries. It
is by attention to such small details as this that a man may purchase
immunity in larger and more important matters. I know this is most
immoral, but it makes the wife happy, the husband comfortable, and would
go far to decimate the divorce rate, so what more could you ask?"

"Perhaps I owe this to the fact that my father was a Hungarian
nobleman--oh, just a trumpery little title, with nothing to pay for the
necessary gold lace, so when he came to America he decided, like so many
of the revolutionists of that period, to be ultra-American, and dropped
even the foreign spelling of the name, changing the 'itz' to plain
'r-i-s,'" he answered. "I'm sure my music belongs to the other side of
the Atlantic."

"That accounts for it all," she said. "There is absolutely no reason why
you shouldn't marry almost any woman you want to. Why not find one who
can give you millions in money and the social position you need without
taking a generation to create one? I hope you haven't any foolish
entanglements," she added.

He flushed, but did not answer, and when a few weeks later he and Silvia
Holland had played together for some charitable entertainment, his
venerable mentor had sought him out, ready to bestow her blessing at the
earliest possible moment, approving his practical judgment and his good
taste. That was a long time ago.

He had resented the implication at the time; to do him justice, had
Silvia been penniless she would still have attracted him as no other
woman ever had. It was partly her personal charm, partly her music. It
may be true that the world of art is still the world, but it is a very
different world from that in which most of us live and move and have our
being, and Morris was conscious when her fingers touched the keys, and
he took up his bow and drew it across the strings of his violin, that
they entered upon a new and boundless universe in which sound superseded
all other mediums of communication, and seemed to