and heelless, felt shoes; who, her whole life
long, had been little better than a domestic servant; in her there
existed a devotion to art which had never wavered. It would have seemed
to her contrary to nature that Franz should be anything but a musician,
and it was also quite in the order of things for them to be poor. Two
younger boys, who were still at school, gave up all their leisure time
to music--they had never in their lives tumbled round a football or
swung a bat--and Franz believed that the elder would prove a skilful
violinist. Of the little girls, one had a pure voice and a good ear,
and was to be a singer--for before this Juggernaut, prejudice went
down. Had anyone suggested to Frau Furst that her daughter should be a
clerk, even a teacher, she would have flung up hands of horror; but
music!--that was a different matter. It was, moreover, the single one
of the arts, in which this staunch advocate of womanliness granted her
sex a share.

"Ask Franz," she said to Maurice. "Franz knows. He will explain. All
women can do is to reproduce what some one else has thought or felt."

As an immortal example of the limits set by sex, she invariably fell
back on Clara Schumann, with whom she had more than once come into
personal contact. In her youth, Frau Furst had had a clear soprano
voice, and, to Maurice's interest, she told him how she had sometimes
been sent for to the Schumann's house in the INSELSTRASSE, to sing
Robert's songs for him.

"Clara accompanied me," she said, relating this, the great reminiscence
of her life; "and he was there, too, although I never saw him face to
face. He was too shy for that. But he was behind a screen, and
sometimes he would call: 'I must alter that; it is too high;' or
'Quicker, quicker!' Sometimes even 'Bravo!'"

Her motherly ambitions for Franz knew no bounds. One of the few
diversions she allowed herself was a visit to the theatre--when Franz
had tickets given to him; when one of her favourite operas was
performed; or on the anniversary of her husband's death--and, on such
occasions, she pointed out to the younger children, the links that
bound and would yet bind them to the great house.

"That was your father's seat," she reminded them every time. "The
second row from the end. He came in at the door to the left. And that,"
pointing to the conductor's raised chair, "is where Franz will sit some
day." For she dreamed of Franz in all the glory of KAPELLMEISTER; saw
him s