t! Better light your pipe again. You see, he stumbled in on me in the
dark when I was pumping away at that old parlour organ to please Mrs.
Lockhart It's her household fetish and I've forgotten how many pounds of
butter she made and sold to buy it. Well, Eric stumbled in, and in some
inarticulate manner made me understand that he wanted me to sing for
him. I sang just the old things, of course. It's queer to sing familiar
things here at the world's end. It makes one think how the hearts of men
have carried them around the world, into the wastes of Iceland and the
jungles of Africa and the islands of the Pacific. I think if one lived
here long enough one would quite forget how to be trivial, and would
read only the great books that we never get time to read in the world,
and would remember only the great music, and the things that are really
worth while would stand out clearly against that horizon over there. And
of course I played the intermezzo from _Cavalleria Rusticana_ for him;
it goes rather better on an organ than most things do. He shuffled his
feet and twisted his big hands up into knots and blurted out that he
didn't know there was any music like that in the world. Why, there were
tears in his voice, Wyllis! Yes, like Rossetti, I _heard_ his tears.
Then it dawned upon me that it was probably the first good music he had
ever heard in all his life. Think of it, to care for music as he does
and never to hear it, never to know that it exists on earth! To long
for it as we long for other perfect experiences that never come. I
can't tell you what music means to that man. I never saw any one so
susceptible to it. It gave him speech, he became alive. When I had
finished the intermezzo, he began telling me about a little crippled
brother who died and whom he loved and used to carry everywhere in his
arms. He did not wait for encouragement. He took up the story and told
it slowly, as if to himself, just sort of rose up and told his own woe
to answer Mascagni's. It overcame me."

"Poor devil," said Wyllis, looking at her with mysterious eyes, "and so
you've given him a new woe. Now he'll go on wanting Grieg and
Schubert the rest of his days and never getting them. That's a girl's
philanthropy for you!"

Jerry Lockhart came out of the house screwing his chin over the unusual
luxury of a stiff white collar, which his wife insisted upon as a
necessary article of toilet while Miss Elliot was at the house. Jerry
sat down on t