During the winter season in New York, she haunted concert halls where celebrated musicians played their works. The new music, however, strident with the echoes of industrialism, dissonant with the tumult of great cities, repelled her. She turned instinctively toward the harmonious romanticism and idealism of a previous age. She felt that the compositions of Schumann and Schubert were the language that had always been imprisoned in her heart, that could never reach her lips, but that she now heard, by a miracle, freed and in its perfection. When the concert was over, she could hardly prevent herself from joining the women who surged toward the author of those sounds, as if impelled by an inexorable force--or possibly by an idea that they must mingle their lives with the life of the stranger who could so interpret their souls, make clear to them their secrets, and give them, at least momentarily, a coherent glimpse of their ideals. One afternoon, in the exit of a concert hall, Lilla met Brantome, a critic of music. He was a robust-looking old Frenchman with white hair and the mustaches of a Viking, displaying a leonine countenance out of which gazed a pair of eyes that seemed to have been made tragical by some profound chagrin. In his youth, a student in Paris, he had written some scores of songs, half a dozen sonatas, and a symphony. These efforts, though technically brilliant, had soon passed into oblivion. After a long while, during which nobody had heard a sound from him, Brantome had popped up in the United States to begin his critical career. Now he was courted not only in artistic circles but also in the fashionable world, where one might sometimes see his haggard old face relentlessly revealed beneath fine chandeliers, ironical and weary, as if crushed beneath the combined weight of disillusionment and renown. At sight of Lilla he stopped in the concert hall doorway; and, when he had peered at her closely, he rumbled in her ear: "I see that this afternoon of bad music has not fooled you. You don't wear the look that I discovered on your face the other day, when they had been playing Schumann." "Oh, but Schumann!" And with a nervous laugh she said, "If I had been Clara Wieck----" "You would have married him just as she did, eh? Ah, well, maybe there will be other Robert Schumanns. In fact, two years ago I found a certain young man--but now he is dying." He lost the smile that had come to him at this contact. With a shrug he passed on, leaving with her the thought of beauty enmeshed by death. She wondered who this young man was, who might have been another Robert Schumann, but now was dying. CHAPTER IV Of all her suitors the most persistent was Cornelius Rysbroek.