ich
the spangled North, with its iridescent auroras, its snow-driven
soundless seas and its arctic cold, were imagined by this woman. She
quickly discerned the Sun theme and the theme of the Shadow, and
alternately blushed and wept at the wonderfully sympathetic tonal
transposition of her idea. That this slight thing should have trapped
his fantasy surprised her. After she had written it, it had seemed
remote, all too white, a "Symphonie en Blanc Majeur"--as Theophile
Gautier would have called it--besides devoid of human interest. But
Arthur had interwoven a human strand of melody, a scarlet skein of
emotion, primal withal, yet an attempt to catch the under emotions of
the ice-bound Esquimaux surprised in their zone of silence by the sleep
of the Shadow, the long night of their dreary winter. And the composer
had succeeded surprisingly well. What boreal epic had he read into
Ellenora's little prose poem, the only thing of hers that he had ever
pretended to admire! She was amazed, stunned. She wondered how all this
emotional richness could have been tapped. Had she left him too soon, or
had her departure developed some richer artistic vein? She tortured her
brain and heart. After a big tonal climax followed by the lugubrious
monologue of a bassoon the work closed.

There was much applause, and she saw her husband come out again and
again bowing. Finally he appeared with the young singer. Ellenora left
the hall and feebly felt her way to the street. As she expected, Paul
was not in sight, so she called a carriage, and getting into it she saw
Arthur drive by with his pretty soprano.

IV

How she reached the train and Philadelphia she hardly remembered. She
was miserably sick at soul, miserably mortified. Her foolish air-castles
vanished, and in their stead she saw the brutal reality. She had
deserted a young genius for a fashionable dilettante. In time she might
have learned to care for Arthur--but how was she to know this? He was
so backward, such a colorless companion!... She almost disliked the man
who had taken her away from him; yet six months ago Ellenora would have
resented the notion that a mere man could have led her. Besides there
was another woman in the muddle now!... In her disgust she longed for
her own zone of silence. In her heart she called Ibsen and Nora Helmer
delusive guides; her chief intellectual staff had failed her and she
began to see Torvald Helmer's troubles in a different light. Perhaps
wh