us. It
took him three minutes to get set right at the piano and to dust his
fingers with a white silk handkerchief which he wore up his sleeve. And
he played with great expression and agony and bending exercises, ever
and anon tossing back his rebellious locks and fixing us with a look of
pained ecstasy. Of course it sounded better than the banjo, but you got
to have the voice with that song if you're meaning to do any crooked
work. Nettie was much taken with it even so, and Wilbur played it
another way. What he said was that it was another school of
interpretation. It seemed to have its points with him, though he
favoured the first school, he said, because of a certain almost rugged
fidelity. He said the other school was marked by a tendency to idealism,
and he pulled some of the handles to show how it was done. I'm merely
telling you how Wilbur talked.

"Nettie listened very serious. There was a new look in her eyes. 'That
song has got to her even on a machinery piano,' I says, 'but wait till
we get the voice, with she and Chester out in the mischievous
moonlight.' Wasn't I the wily old hound! Nettie sort of lingered to hear
Wilbur, who was going good by this time. 'One must be the soul behind
the wood and wire,' he says; 'one rather feels just that, or one remains
merely a brutal mechanic.'

"'I understand,' says Nettie. 'How you must have studied!'

"'Oh, studied!' says Wilbur, and tossed his mane back and laughed in a
lofty and suffering manner. Studied! He'd gone one year to a business
college in Seattle after he got out of high school!

"'I understand,' says Nettie, looking all reverent and buffaloed.

"'It is the price one must pay for technique,' says Wilbur. 'And to-day
you found me in the mood. I am not always in the mood.'

"'I understand,' says Nettie.

"I'm just giving you an idea, understand. Then Wilbur says, 'I will
bring these records up this evening if I may. The mezzo-soprano requires
a radically different adjustment from the barytone.' 'My God!' thinks I,
'has he got technique on the phonograph, too!' But I says he must come
by all means, thinking he could tend the machine while Nettie and
Chester is out on the porch getting wise to each other.

"'There's another teep for you,' I says to Nettie when we got out of the
place. 'He certainly is marked by tendencies,' I says. I meant it for a
nasty slam at Wilbur's painful deficiencies as a human being, but she
took it as serious as Wilbur took