flat, while AS is
our A flat and H our B natural. He was also pleased to note that the
letters S-C-H-A were in his own name.

While all this flirtation and loving and getting betrothed was going on
in the home of Wieck, there was another member of the same household,
another pupil of the same teacher, who was not deriving so much delight
from the arrangement. Through it all, a great-eyed, great-hearted,
greatly suffering little girl of fifteen was learning, for the first
time, sorrow. This was Clara Wieck, who was already electrifying the
most serious critics and captivating the most cultured audiences by the
maturity of her art, already winning an encore with a Bach fugue,--an
unheard-of miracle. As Wieck wrote in the diary, which he and his
daughter kept together, "This marked a new era in piano music." At the
age of twelve, she played with absolute mastery the most difficult
music ever written.

But her public triumph made her only half-glad, for she was watching at
home the triumph of another girl over the youth she loved. Can't you
see her now in her lonely room, reeling off from under her fleet
fingers the dazzling arpeggios, while the tears gather in her eyes and
fall upon her hands?

Four years later she could write to Schumann:

"I must tell you what a silly child I was then. When Ernestine came to
us I said, 'Just wait till you learn to know Schumann, he is my
favorite of all my acquaintances,' But she did not care to know you,
since she said she knew a gentleman in Asch, whom she liked much
better. That made me mad; but it was not long before she began to like
you better and it soon went so far that every time you came I had to
call her. I was glad to do this since I was pleased that she liked you.
But you talked more and more with her and cut me short; that hurt me a
good deal; but I consoled myself by saying it was only natural since
you were with me all the time; and, besides, Ernestine was more
grown-up than I. Still queer feelings filled my heart, so young it was,
and so warmly it beat even then. When we went walking you talked to
Ernestine and poked fun at me. Father shipped me off to Dresden on that
account, where I again grew hopeful, and I said to myself, 'How pretty
it would be if he were only your husband,'"

From Dresden, Clara wrote to "Lieber Herr Schumann," a quizzical letter
advising him to drink "less Bavarian beer; not to turn night into day;
to let your girl friends know that you thin