nalities--a German Grand Duke, a Bulgarian
Ambassador, Countesses, both French and Italian, and even a Belgian
princess. But to his boundless amazement--for he had always heard that
Americans were wax before titles--not one of the social leaders had
been of the faintest assistance to him, not even the owner of the
Chicago Palace, to whom he had been recommended by the Belgian
princess. He had penetrated through one or two esoteric doors, only to
find himself outside them again. Not once had he been asked to play.
It was some weeks before it even dawned upon the minor prophet of
European music-rooms that he was being shut out, still longer before
it permeated to his brain that he had been shut out as a Jew!

Those barbarous Americans, so far behind Europe after all! Had they
not even discovered that art levels all ranks and races? Poor
bourgeois money-mongers with their mushroom civilization. It was not
even as if he were really a Jew. Did they imagine he wore phylacteries
or earlocks, or what? His few childish years in the Russian Pale--what
were they to the long years of European art and European culture? And
even if in Rome or Paris he had foregathered with Jews like Schneemann
or Leopold Barstein, it was to the artist in them he had gravitated,
not the Jew. Did these Yankee ignoramuses suppose he did not share
their aversion from the gaberdine or the three brass balls? Oh the
narrow-souled anti-Semites!

The deck-steward stacked the chairs, piled up the forgotten rugs and
novels, tidying the deck for the night, but still the embittered
musician tramped to and fro under the silent stars. Only from the
smoking-room where the amateur auctioneer was still hilariously
selling the numbers for a sweepstake, came sounds in discord with the
solemnity of sky and sea, and the artist was newly jarred at this
vulgar gaiety flung in the face of the spacious and starry mystery of
the night. And these jocose, heavy-jowled, smoke-soused gamblers were
the Americans whose drawing-rooms he would contaminate! He recalled
the only party to which he had been asked--'To meet the Bright
Lights'--and which to his amazement turned out to be a quasi-public
entertainment with the guests seated in rows in a hall, and
himself--with the other Bright Lights--planted on a platform and made
to perform without a fee. The mean vulgarians! But perhaps it was
better they had left him untainted with their dollars--better,
comparatively poor though he was