sic like the air, the tides, the mountains, the
moon, sun, and stars! Your old-fashioned melody and learning, your
school-boy rules of counterpoint--all these Illowski ignores."

Lenyard eagerly interrupted her: "You say that he does away with melody,
themes, harmony--how does he replace them, and how does he treat the
human voice?" Neshevna let his arm fall and went slowly to the tall
desk. She leaned against it, her hand upon her square chin. Scheff still
gazed out upon the lawn where splashed a small, movable fountain. To
Lenyard the air seemed as if charged with electric questionings. His
head throbbed.

"You ask me something I dare not tell. Even Scheff, who knows some
things, dares not tell. If Illowski's discovery--which is based on the
great natural laws of heat, light, gravitation, electricity--if this
discovery were placed in the hands of fools, the world would perish.
Music has been so long the plaything of sensuality, the theatre for idle
men and women, that its real greatness is forgotten. In Illowski's hands
it is a moral force. He comes to destroy that he may rebuild. He
accomplishes it with the raw elements themselves. Remember--'I hear the
grinding of the swords, and He shall come--!'" Neshevna made a nervous
gesture and disappeared through a door near the tall desk covered with
music-paper--the desk whereon Illowski plotted the ruin of civilization.

"Now since you have seen the dread laboratory, don't hang around that
desk; there's nothing there you can understand. The music-paper is
covered with electrical and chemical formulae, not notes. I've seen them.
Lenyard, let's go back to Paris and dine, like sensible men,--which we
are not." Scheff dragged his friend out of the house, for the other was
in a stupor. Neshevna's words cleaved his very soul. The American, the
puritan in him, swiftly rose to her eloquent exhortation. All life was
corrupt, he had been taught; art was corrupt, a snare, a delusion.
Yet--was all its appalling power, its sensuous grandeur to be wasted in
the service of the world, the flesh, the devil? Lenyard paused. "Oh,
come on, Len. Why do you bother your excitable, sick heart with that
lunatic's prophecies? Illowski is a big man, a very big man; but he is
mad, mad! His theories of the decomposition of tone--he only imitates
the old painter-impressionist of long ago--and his affected
simplicity--why, he is after the big public, that's all. As to your
question about what part the