sohn's "Consolation" seemed, as he
played, to flow, not from the instrument, but, like some invisible
ether, from his finger-tips themselves.

"You hear," he said to Laura, "the effect of questions and answer in
this. The questions are passionate and tumultuous and varied, but the
answer is always the same, always calm and soothing and dignified."

She answered with a long breath, speaking just above a whisper:

"Oh, yes, yes, I understand."

He finished and turned towards her a moment. "Possibly not a very high
order of art," he said; "a little too 'easy,' perhaps, like the
Bougereau, but 'Consolation' should appeal very simply and directly,
after all. Do you care for Beethoven?"

"I--I am afraid--" began Laura, but he had continued without waiting
for her reply.

"You remember this? The 'Appassionata,' the F minor sonata just the
second movement."

But when he had finished Laura begged him to continue.

"Please go on," she said. "Play anything. You can't tell how I love it."

"Here is something I've always liked," he answered, turning back to the
keyboard. "It is the 'Mephisto Walzer' of Liszt. He has adapted it
himself from his own orchestral score, very ingeniously. It is
difficult to render on the organ, but I think you can get the idea of
it." As he spoke he began playing, his head very slightly moving to the
rhythm of the piece. At the beginning of each new theme, and without
interrupting his playing, he offered a word, of explanation:

"Very vivid and arabesque this, don't you think? ... And now this
movement; isn't it reckless and capricious, like a woman who hesitates
and then takes the leap? Yet there's a certain nobility there, a
feeling for ideals. You see it, of course.... And all the while this
undercurrent of the sensual, and that feline, eager sentiment ... and
here, I think, is the best part of it, the very essence of passion, the
voluptuousness that is a veritable anguish.... These long, slow
rhythms, tortured, languishing, really dying. It reminds one of
'Phedre'--'Venus toute entiere,' and the rest of it; and Wagner has the
same. You find it again in Isolde's motif continually."

Laura was transfixed, all but transported. Here was something better
than Gounod and Verdi, something above and beyond the obvious one, two,
three, one, two, three of the opera scores as she knew them and played
them. Music she understood with an intuitive quickness; and those
prolonged chords of Liszt's, heavy