ion she
awaited criticism, but with the air of an armed warrior.

"Really, Mrs. Vibert, I am overwhelmed," I managed to stammer. "Only
the most delicate symbolism may dare to express such a theme." I felt
that this was very vague--but what could I say?

She regarded me sternly. Arthur, catching what I had uttered at random,
burst in:

"There, Ellenora, I am sure he is right! You leave nothing to the
imagination. Now a subtile veiled idealism--" He was not allowed to
finish.

"Veiled idealism indeed!" she angrily cried. "You composers dare to say
all manner of wickedness in your music, but it is idealized by tone,
isn't it? What else is music but a sort of sensuous algebra? Or a vast
shadow-picture of the emotions?... Why can't language have the same
privilege? Why must it be bridled because the world speaks it?"

"Just because of that reason, dear madame," I soothingly said; "because
reticence is art's brightest crown; because Zola never gives us a real
human document and Flaubert does; and the difference is a difference of
method. Flaubert is magnificently naked, but his nakedness implicates
nothing that is--"

"As usual you men enter the zone of silence when a woman's work is
mentioned. I did not attempt a monument in the frozen manner of your
Flaubert. Mr. Goddard believes--" There was a crash of music from the
piano as Arthur endeavored to change the conversation. His wife's fine
indifference was tantalizing, also instructive.

"Mr. Goddard believes with Nietzsche that individualism is the only
salvation of the race. My husband, Mr. Vibert, believes in altruism,
self-sacrifice and all the old-fashioned flummery of outworn creeds."

"I wonder if Mr. Vibert has heard of Nietzsche's 'Thou goest to women?
Remember thy whip'?" I meekly questioned. Ellenora looked at her husband
and shrugged her shoulders; then picking up her manuscript she left the
room with the tread of a soldier, laughing all the while.

"An exasperating girl!" I mused, as Vibert, after some graceful
swallow-like flights on the keyboard, finally played that most
dolorously delicious of Chopin's nocturnes, the one in C sharp minor.

That night in my studio I did not rejoice over my bachelorhood, for I
felt genuinely sad at the absence of agreeable modulations in the
married life of my two friends.

I thought about the thing for the next month, with the conclusion that
people had to work out their own salvation, and resolved not to visit
th