This is the story that I dreamed as I sat on the bench listening to the pretty, sprightly music flowing like a live thing. Under the fingers of the old woman the music scratched along like dead leaves along a pathway, without accent, without rhythm; now the old gavotte tripped like the springtime, pretty as the budding trees, as the sunlight along the swards. Mildred brought out the contrast between the detached and the slurred notes. How gaily it went! Full of the fashion of the time--the wigs, the swords, the bows, the gallantry! How sedate! How charming! How well she understood it! How well the old women danced to it! How delighted every one was! She played on until the old women, unable to dance any more, sat down to listen to her. After trying some few things which I did not know, I heard her playing a piece of music which I could not but think I had heard before--in church! Beginning it on the low string, she poured out the long, long phrase that never seems to end, so stern and so evocative of Protestantism that I could not but think of a soul going forth on its way to the Judgment Seat, telling perforce as it goes how it has desired and sought salvation, pleading almost defiantly. But Mildred could not appreciate such religious exaltation, yet it was her playing that had inspired the thought in me. Had she been taught to play it? Was she echoing another's thought? Her playing did not sound like an echo; it seemed to come from the heart, or out of some unconscious self, an ante-natal self that in her present incarnation only emerged in music, borne up by some mysterious current to be sucked down by another. She played other things, not certain what she was going to play; and then, as if suddenly moved to tell us about other things, she began to play a very simple, singing melody, interrupted now and again, so it seemed to me, by little fluttering confessions. I seemed to see a lady in white, at the close of day, in a dusky boudoir, one of Alfred Stevens's women, only much more refined, one whose lover has been unfaithful to her, or maybe a woman who is weary of lovers and knows not what to turn her mind to, hesitating between the convent and the ball-room. Ah, the beautiful lament--how well Mildred played it!--followed by the slight crescendo, and then the return of the soul upon itself, bewailing its weakness, confessing its follies in elegant, lovely language, seemingly speaking in a casual way, yet saying such profound things, profound even as Bach. The form is different, more light, more graceful, apparently more superficial, but just as deep; for when we go to the bottom of things all things are deep, one as deep as another, just as all things are shallow, one as shallow as another; for have not mystics of every age held that things exist not in themselves, but in the eye that sees and the ear that hears?