how is your wife, and how is that wonderful concerto
we've all been hearing about?"

He shrugged his shoulders and asked for a cigarette.

"Shall I play you some bits of it?" he queried in a gloomy way. I was
all eagerness, and presently he was absently preluding at my piano.

There was little vigor in his touch, and I recalled his rambling wits by
crying, "The concerto, let's have it!"

Arthur pulled himself together and began. He was very modern in musical
matters and I liked the dynamic power of his opening. The first subject
was more massive than musical and was built on the architectonics of
Liszt and Tschaikowsky. There was blood in the idea, plenty of nervous
fibre, and I dropped my brushes and palette as the unfolding of the work
began with a logical severity and a sense of form unusual in so young a
mind.

This first movement interested me; I almost conjured up the rich
instrumentation and when it ended I was warm in my congratulations.

Arthur moodily wiped his brow and looked indifferent.

"And now for the second movement. My boy, you always had a marked gift
for the lyrical. Give us your romanza--the romanza, I should say, born
of your good lady!"

He answered me shortly: "There is no romance, I've substituted for it a
scherzo. You know that's what Saint-Saens and all the fellows are doing
nowadays, Scharwenka too."

I fancied that there was a shade of eager anxiety in his explanation,
but I said nothing and listened.

The scherzo--or what is called the scherzo since Beethoven and
Schumann--was too heavy, inelastic in its tread, to dispel the
blue-devils. It was conspicuous for its absence of upspringing delicacy,
light, arch merriment. It was the sad, bitter joking of a man upon whose
soul life has graven pain and remorse, and before the trio was reached I
found myself watching the young composer's face. I knew that, like all
modern music students, he had absorbed in Germany some of that
scholastic pessimism we encounter in the Brahms music, but I had hoped
that a mere fashion of the day would not poison the springs of this
fresh personality.

Yet here I was confronted with a painful confession that life had
brought the lad more than its quantum of spiritual and physical
hardship; he was telling me all this in his music, for his was too
subjective a talent to ape the artificial, grand, objective manner.

Without waiting for comment he plunged into his last movement which
proved to be a serie