"But it hasn't been. It is the rejection he is celebrating. He told me so. I feel sorry for the fellow, so I said we would go." "Of course we will!" exclaimed Mariana. "But I'm afraid he'll be gloomy." "On the contrary, he has just come off a spree, and has a patch over his left eye. His hilarity is positively annoying. He and Ardly are smashing everything in their rooms. The pitcher went as I passed." "Oh, it is his way of expressing feeling," returned Mariana, sympathetically. "Listen to this new air. It goes tra la la, tra--" Anthony cut her short. "My dear girl, I'm in an awful hurry. Would you mind being quiet awhile?" And he entered his study, closing the door after him. Mariana left the piano and sat with folded hands looking down into the street below. A fine rain was falling, and the streets were sloppy with a whitish slime. The women that passed held their skirts well above their ankles, revealing all shapes and varieties of feet. She noticed that they carried their skirts awkwardly, with a curious hitch upon the right hip. They were working-women for the most part, and their gowns were neither well made nor well cut, but they walked aggressively, with an uneven, almost masculine, swagger. Mariana yawned and sighed. She would have liked to go back to the piano and bang a march or some stirring strain of martial music, but she recalled Anthony's injunction and yawned again. She remembered suddenly that her practising had become uncertain of late, and that Anthony's objection seemed to lie like a drawn sword between her and her art. An involuntary smile crossed her lips, that she who had pledged herself to the pursuit of music had also given herself to a man to whom Wagner was as Rossini. She dwelt upon her changed conditions almost unconsciously. It was not that her devotion to art had cooled since her marriage, but that something was forever preventing the expression of it. That Anthony regarded it as one of the trivialities of life, she saw clearly, and there was an aggrieved note in her regret. To her, in whom the artistic instinct was bone of her bone and blood of her blood, the sacrifice of a professional career was less slight than Algarcife believed, and in the depths of her heart there still lurked the hope that in time Anthony's impassioned opposition to a stage life would wear itself out. When the moment came, she dreamed of a final reinspiration of the slumbering fires of her ambition. Now, as she sat beside the window, she became aware of the awakening. Once again she allowed her mind to hover above the distant future and to illuminate its neutral canvas with garish colors. In the future anything and everything was possible. Some weeks ago Signor Morani had sent for her and offered her tuition, and she had accepted. "If you achieve success you can repay me," he had said, adding, with philosophic intention, "If not, I shall have lost nothing that was my own."