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he was bundled up and delivered on a platform, and then bundled up and carried to a hotel

and put to bed. Hansi's face of a young Jewish saint, Hansi's soulful dark eyes, Hansi's dream of

loveliness embodied in sound, drove the ladies quite beside themselves; they listened with hands

clasped together, they rushed to the platform and would have thrown themselves at his feet, to say

nothing of his head. But there was that erect and watchful-eyed granddaughter of the Puritans,

with a formula which she said as often as it was called for: "I do everything for my husband

that he requires—absolutely everything!"

The other members of the party were Freddi Robin's wife, and her baby boy, a month older

than little Frances. Freddi was at the University of Berlin, hoping to get a degree in economics.

Rahel, a serious, gentle girl, contributed a mezzo-soprano voice to the choir of the yacht; also

she led in singing choruses. With two pianos, a violin, a clarinet, and Mr. Dingle's mouth-organ,

they could sail the Mediterranean in safety, being able to drown out the voices of any sirens

who might still be sitting on its rocky shores.

VII

If music be the food of love, play on! They were gathered in Lanny's studio at Bienvenu,

which had been built for Marcel and in which he had done his best work as a painter. There

were several of his works on the walls, and a hundred or so stored in a back room. The piano

was the big one which Lanny had purchased for Kurt Meissner and which he had used for seven

years before going back to Germany. The studio was lined with bookcases containing the

library of Lanny's great-great-uncle. Here were all sorts of memories of the dead, and hopes of

the living, with cabinets of music-scores in which both kinds of human treasures had been

embodied and preserved. Hansi and Bess were playing Tchaikovsky's great concerto, which

meant so much to them. Hansi had rendered it at his debut in Carnegie Hall, with Bess and her

parents in the audience; a critical occasion for the anxious young lovers.

Next evening they went over to Sept Chenes to meet a distinguished company, most of the

fashionable people who had not yet left the Cote d'Azur. The whole family went, including Irma

and Rahel. Since it was only a fifteen-minute drive from Bienvenu, the young nursing mothers

might have three hours and a half of music and social life; but they mustn't get excited. The

two of them heartened each other, making bovine life a bit more tolerable. The feat they were

performing was considered picturesque, a harmless eccentricity about which the ladies gossiped;

the older ones mentioned it to their husbands, but the younger ones kept quiet, not wishing to

put any notions into anybody's head. No Rousseau in our family, thank you!

Hansi and Bess played Lalo's Symphonie Espagnole, a composition which audiences welcome

and which has to be in the repertoire of every virtuoso: a melancholy and moving andante over

which the ladies may sigh; a scherzando to which young hearts may dance over flower-strewn

meadows. It was no holiday for Bess, who wasn't sure if she was good enough for this

fastidious company; but she got through it all right and received her share of compliments.

Lanny, who knew the music well, permitted his eyes to roam over the audience, and wondered

what they were making of it, behind the well-constructed masks they wore. What to them was

the meaning of these flights of genius, these incessant calls to the human spirit, these unremitting

incitements to ecstasy? Whose feet were swift enough to trip among these meadows? Whose

spring was high enough to leap upon these mountain-tops? Who wept for these dying worlds?

Who marched in these triumphal processions, celebrating the birth of new epochs?

The thirty-year-old Lanny Budd had come to understand his world, and no longer cherished

any illusions concerning the ladies and gentlemen at a soiree musicale. Large, well-padded

matrons who had been playing bridge all afternoon, and had spent so many hours choosing the

fabrics, the jeweled slippers, the necklaces, brooches, and tiaras which made up their splendid

ensemble—what fairy feet did they have, even in imagination? What tears did they shed forthe

lost hopes of mankind? There was Beauty's friend, Madame de Sarce, with two marriageable

daughters and an adored only son who had squandered their fortune in the gambling-palaces.

Lanny doubted if any one of the family was thinking about music.

And these gentlemen, with their black coats and snowy shirt-fronts in which their valets had

helped to array them—what tumults of exultation thrilled their souls tonight? They had all

dined well, and more than one looked drowsy. Others fixed their eyes upon the smooth bare

backs of the ladies in front of them. Close to the musicians sat Graf Hohenstauffen, monocled

German financier, wearing a pleased smile all through the surging finale; Lanny had heard