e. The
air in a room should be melodious, for the same reason that it should
be faintly pleasing to the olfactory sense, and neither hot nor stuffy.
Just as the walls should be delightfully coloured and softly lit, and
the refreshments pleasant and at the moment of need. But surely we
meet for human intercourse. When I go to see people I go to see the
people--not to hear a hired boy play the piano. But these people plant
a _chevaux de frise_ of singers and performers upon instruments of
music between themselves and me. They gag me with a few pennyworths of
second-hand opera. There I was bursting to talk, and nice,
intelligent-looking girls to talk to, and whenever I began to say
something they said '_Sssh_!' Tantalus in a drawing-room it was--the
very Hades of hospitality.

"Surely some day we shall learn refinement in our entertaining. Your
modern hostess issues her invitations and seems overcome with
consternation at her gathering. 'What _shall_ I do with all these
people?' she seems to ask. So she dabs cakes upon them, piles coffee
cups over them: 'Eat,' she says, 'and shut up!' and stifles their
protests with a clamorous woman and a painful piano.

"No, of course I don't object to having music. But it is an accessory,
not an object, in life. It is, after all, a physical comfort, a
pleasant vibration in one's ears. To make an object of it is
sensuality. It is on all-fours with worshipping the wallpaper. Some
wall-papers are very beautiful things nowadays, harmonious in form and
colour, skilful in invention; but people do not expect you to sit down
and admire wall-paper, or promise you 'wallpaper at eight.' Neither do
they put an extinguisher over any girl who does not go with the
wall-paper, or expect you to dress in neutral tint on account of it,
and they are not hurt if you go away without seeming to see it.
Gustatory harmony, too, is very delicious. Yet there is no hush during
dinner; they do not insist upon a persistent gnawing in honour of the
feast. But these musical people! their god is their piano. They set
up an idol in their salon, and command all the world to bow down to it.
They found a priestcraft of pianists, and an Inquisition of fiddlers.
When I came away they were all crowded round a violin, the women
especially. They could not have fussed more if it had been a baby.
They stroked it and admired its figure. It _had_ rather a fashionable
figure, but the neck was too long...."