tty's narrative,
which she had pretended to believe, had set this man in the middle
class. Never in this world. There was only one middle class out of which
such a personality might, and often did, emerge--the American middle
class. In Europe, never. No peasant blood, no middle-class corpuscle,
stirred in this man's veins. The ancient boyar looked down at her.

"Play!" said Kitty. There was a smile on her lips, but there was fiery
challenge in her slate-blue eyes. The blood of Irish kings--and what
Irishman dares deny it?--surged into her throat.

We wear masks, we inherit generations of masks; and a trivial incident
reveals the primordial which lurks in each one of us. Savages--Kitty
with her stone hatchet and Hawksley swinging the curved blade of Hunk.

He began one of those tempestuous compositions, brilliant and
bewildering, that submerge the most appreciative lay mentality--because
he was angry, a double anger that he should be angry over he knew not
what--and broke off in the middle of the composition because Kitty sat
upright, stonily unimpressed.

Tschaikowsky's "Serenade Melancolique." Kitty, after a few measures,
laid aside her stone hatchet, and her body relaxed. Music! She began to
absorb it as parched earth absorbs the tardy rain. Then came the waltz
which had haunted her. Her face grew tenderly beautiful; and Hawksley, a
true artist, saw that he had discovered the fifth string; and he played
upon it with all the artistry which was naturally his and which had been
given form by the master who had taught him.

For the physical exertions he relied upon nerve energy again. Nature
is generous when we are young. No matter how much we draw against the
account she always has a little more for us. He forgot that only an hour
gone he had been dizzy with pain, forgot everything but the glory of
the sounds he was evoking and their visible reaction upon this girl. The
devil was not only in his heart, but in his hand.

Never had Kitty heard such music. To be played to in this
manner--directly, with embracing tenderness, with undivided fire--would
have melted the soul of Gobseck the money lender; and Kitty was
warm-blooded, Irish, emotional. The fiddle called poignantly to the
Irish in her. She wanted to go roving with this man; with her hand on
his shoulder to walk in the thin air of high places. Through it all,
however, she felt vaguely troubled; the instinct of the trap. The
sinister and cynical idea which had c