I cannot remember any new passions from then on until my sixteenth year. Lorchen’s picture soon and completely faded from my memory. I was tremendously taken up, first with learning English, New York school life, my musical studies, playing marbles, flying kites, and building ships to sail on the pond in Central Park. But when I was fifteen a little Frenchman came to New York and presented himself to my father with his two little daughters, Louise and Jeanne, who were both pianist prodigies. Louise was fifteen and little Jeanne only twelve. The latter was truly remarkable, and her playing made quite a stir in New York at the time. But I was singularly drawn toward the older sister, Louise. Their mother had died when the children were very young and Louise had quite taken the mother’s place and watched over Jeanne with a maternal solicitude and tenderness truly remarkable in so young a girl. She played exquisitely herself, and I can still hear the velvety touch of her fingers in the A Flat Etude of Chopin, but in her adoration for her younger sister’s more brilliant talent she completely effaced herself, and it was only with difficulty that one could get her to play if her sister was present. They lived in a little French boarding-house and I used to love to go there in the evening, and while Jeanne would play for us in most brilliant fashion Louise would sit at a table in the centre of the room and, under the mellow light of a centre lamp, would darn stockings or deftly refashion some dress which Jeanne was to wear at her next concert. Louise had the gentlest of brown eyes, and her face and bearing breathed a tranquillity and sweetness rarely found in the agitating nervous life of to-day. She was not talkative, but when she spoke her eyes would smile and crinkle up in very ingratiating fashion. I had certainly outgrown the slapping age, but had not yet developed the courage to declare my adoration. I seem to have been quite content to sit next to Louise, and to look into her gentle eyes, or watch her deft fingers as they pleated and sewed and did all those clever things which women’s fingers alone know how to do. That spring, alas, the father and his daughters returned to France and I have never seen them again. But so inconstant is youth that the following year I fell madly in love with Madame Teresa Carreno, of whom I have already written in an earlier chapter. I was sixteen and she was twenty-four, radiantly beautiful, brilliantly educated, and a remarkable linguist, speaking English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian with equal fluency. But for me her eyes spoke a language even more eloquent than her tongue, and it was small wonder that I was bowled over completely. On my first concert tour, her beauty, her exquisite playing, and the languorous half-tropical charms of the South through which we were touring was a combination I could not withstand.