She sat at an upright piano and trifled with the keys, almost inaudibly. It was midnight and an acrimonious man in the next room often remonstrated with the wall when her piano conversed too impulsively. Since she was an unknown composer the moment is appropriate for an attack upon her obscurity. Her music was the compact Sunday of her life. There she deserted the trite miserliness of narrative and definite concepts and designed a spacious holiday. Her notes loafed and romped into inquisitive patterns and were only intent upon shifting their positions. Thought and emotion presided over the experimental revels of their servants but issued no narrow commands and became broadly festive guidances. In her music the rules of harmony were neither neglected nor worshipped. When they felt an immense friendliness for the romping of her notes they made a natural background: otherwise, they did not intrude. Her music did not strive to suggest or interpret concepts and pictures nor did it salaam to emotions. All three were seconds rising and dying as her sounds changed their places. The first few notes of each composition were repeated above as the title, not because they dominated the piece, but merely as a means of identification. In her wanly nondescript room which she did not own, from midnight to dawn, this woman whose face was a bewilderment of contrasts, sat furnishing the momentum for a reveling deluge of music. But an evening decided to interrupt this performance. Olga stood in the shop of a neighborhood cobbler. He was a frayed apologia, with a scant distraction of gray hair and a dustily crushed face. “When you play violin in theater I have heard,” he said. “Maybe you would like to hear my boy. He is only eleven but he play almost so good as you. Maybe you will tell him how he can play better.” Olga followed him to the rear of his shop, with a surface purchase of pity. He trotted out his son, a comedy in light browns relieved by the smothered fixity of gray eyes. With whining precision the boy twisted his way through Massenet’s Elegy, defending each sliding note with his arms and his head. The syrupy embrace of a world stirred upon his acceptant face; the whites of his eyes hovered against Olga’s face, like a writhing request. In the midst of his playing she turned and fled, terror-stricken, down the street. ETHICS