She returned to the villa to find visitors, women whom she had known in girlhood, who had married members of the Italian nobility, and now were sojourning in the neighborhood. They brought men with them, and sometimes stayed to dinner. One night, as she leaned against the balustrade of the terrace, watching the strings of lights across the lake, a young Roman, tall, dark and aquiline, handsome and strong, laid his hand upon hers. "It is a world made for happiness," he breathed. The others, in the white-walled room now mellow from lamplight, were clustered round the piano, and one of them was singing a song by Tosti. Without drawing away her hand, Lilla returned: "Happiness. Yes, tell me what it consists in." "In the glory of life and love. In the splendors of this world and our acceptance of them--we who are this world's strange, sensitive culmination. Not to question, but to feel, with these feelings of ours that a thousand generations have made so fine, so complex. To be natural in the heart of nature." She smiled mournfully: "You realists! And are these things that you celebrate reality? They fade and die----" "But while they live they live," he cried low, with an accent of austere passion, and seized her in his arms. For a moment she did not move. She let herself feel that contact, that strength and fervor, with a nearly analytical attentiveness, with, a melancholy curiosity. But of a sudden she pushed him from her with a surprising strength, her heart beating wildly. She stared at him in amazement, then entered the house. A fortnight later she returned to New York. Winter was imminent; but few of her friends had yet appeared in town. One day on Fifth Avenue, however, she met old Brantome, the critic, who invited her to an afternoon of music at his apartment. CHAPTER XVII In Brantome's living room the book shelves rose to the ceiling; between them the spaces on the walls were covered with the mementoes of a long life. On the tables stood bowls of flowers, stacks of musical scores, trays of wineglasses, cigarette boxes that had once been jewel cases, half-empty teacups, and the gold purses or jet handbags of women who reclined in the deep chairs with their faces turned toward the piano. Men leaned smoking in the heavily curtained embrasures of the windows, their foreheads lowered, their eyebrows casting over their eyes the shadows as if of a profound fatigue. Beside the hall door loomed the white mane of Brantome, who turned, at an inflow of artificial light, to greet the small Italian woman that had recently become a prima donna. And presently this song bird warbled for her comrades of the arts, as she would have done in no other company. The air shook from her agile cadenzas. A last, long trill, high and pure, died away vibrating in the vases of iridescent glass. Then some one persuaded Brantome to play a piece of Schumann's. And once more Lilla heard _Vienna Carnival_.