Young people, meeting here, would
greet one another shyly, with unfamiliar ceremoniousness, and then,
after listening awhile to the music and exchanging a few awkward
phrases, wander away as if by common consent--further away from this
crowd and garish brilliance, far away, into some fragrant cell, where
the light was dim.
"What do you make of it?" asked Keith of Madame Steynlin, who was
listening intently. "Is this music? If so, I begin to understand its
laws. They are physical. I seem to feel the effect of it in the lower
part of my chest. Perhaps that is the region which musical people call
their ear. Tell me, Madame Steynlin, what is music?"
"That's a puzzle," said the bishop, greatly interested.
"How can I explain it to you? It is so complicated, and you have so
many guests this evening. You are coming to my picnic after the
festival of Saint Eulalia? Yes? Well, I will try to explain it
then"--and her eye turned, with a kind of maternal solicitude, down the
pathway to where, in that patch of bright moonshine, her young friend
Krasnojabkin, gloriously indifferent to gipsies and everything else,
was astounding people by the audacity of his terpsichorean antics.
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