I answered, “No,” and felt ashamed. I went on to prove that it was not my fault, that my father had refused to allow me to join the club, but at that point I caught Gerald’s eyes watching me with an expression of interest, and I suddenly blushed. “Do _you_ play?” I asked him aggressively. He seemed surprised. His glance just brushed mine and rested on a picture above my head. “No,” he answered quietly. “Gerald is studying music abroad,” said Mrs. Carroll, “at Vienna, where I don’t suppose they have ever heard of golf. He is going to be a musician.” “How interesting!” exclaimed Miss Dick. “Fancy, Vienna!” Miss Dick was Mrs. Carroll’s companion, and was even, in some distant way, related to her. Her family, however, had fallen on evil days, and she was permanently settled at Derryaghy. She was a gushing, fussy, kindly creature, with a minimum allowance of brains, but overflowing with good intentions and amazingly loyal in her affections, though these latter, I must add, had never been bestowed upon me. I took Mrs. Carroll’s word for it that she had once been very pretty, but now her thinness, accentuating a peculiar type of feature, gave her an absurd resemblance to a lean and restless fowl. I noticed that she had attired herself to-night as for a striking festival. She was a person liable to these unexpected changes in the degree of her brilliancy, which at present was positively dazzling. She began to ask about Vienna, and expressed a deep regret at never having visited that city. “We have had the piano specially tuned for you,” said Mrs. Carroll to Gerald. “Oh you shouldn’t have bothered,” he answered. “You evidently don’t know what it was like before!” I began, and then stopped short. Nobody took any notice. Miss Dick, who seemed determined, cost what it might, to keep the conversation on the subject of music, mentioned that her mother had heard Patti in “La Sonnambula,” and how, when that great prima donna had paused in the middle of the opera to sing “Home Sweet Home,” the entire house had risen to its feet with enthusiasm. “It has always seemed to me that music is the most perfect of the arts,” she added, fixing her lace collar. “Painting is the most perfect of the arts,” I contradicted. Somehow, when they were uttered, all my remarks sounded unhappy, not to say rude, though I was only trying to be agreeable. Miss Dick accentuated this last one by helping herself to potatoes in significant silence. “You can look at a picture oftener than you can read a book,” I went on, addressing Gerald, “and oftener than you can listen to a piece of music.” “I daresay,” he answered, and I resented his politeness. “Why can’t he stand up for his own business?” I thought.