As she walks softly and quietly in, I am conscious of a disappointment. I had unwittingly framed for her an aesthetic violin, with the essential strings and bridge and bow indeed, but submerged and forgot in such Orient splendors as befit her glorious genius. Barbaric pearl and gold, finest carved work, flashing gems from Indian water-courses, the delicatest pink sea-shell, a bubble-prism caught and crystallized,--of all rare and curious substances wrought with dainty device, fantastic as a dream, and resplendent as the light, should her instrument be fashioned. Only in "something rich and strange" should the mystic soul lie sleeping for whom her lips shall break the spell of slumber, and her young fingers unbar the sacred gates. And, oh, me! it is, after all, the very same old red fiddle! Dee, dee! But she neither glides nor trips nor treads, as heroines invariably do, but walks in like a good Christian woman. She steps upon the stage and faces the audience that gives her hearty greeting and waits the prelude. There is time for cool survey. I am angry still about the red fiddle, and I look scrutinizingly at her dress and think how ugly are hoops. The skirt is white silk,--a brocade, I believe,--at any rate, stiff, and, though probably full to overflowing in the hands of the seamstress, who must compress it within prescribed limits about the waist, looks scanty and straight, because, like all other skirts in the world at this present writing, it is stretched over a barrel. Why could she not, she who comes before us to-night, not as a fashion, but an inspiration,--why could she not discard the mode, and assume that immortal classic drapery whose graceful falls and folds the sculptor vainly tries to imitate, the painter vainly seeks to limn? When Corinne tuned her lyre at the Capitol, when she knelt to be crowned with her laurel crown at the hands of a Roman senator, is it possible to conceive her swollen out with crinoline? And yet I remember, that, though _sa robe était blanche, et son costume était très pittoresque_, it was _sans s'écarter cependant assez des usages reçus pour que l'on pût y trouver de l'affectation_; and I suppose, if one should now suddenly collapse from conventional rotundity to antique statuesqueness, the great "_on_" would very readily "_y trouver de l'affectation_." Nevertheless, though one must dress in Rome as Romans do, and though the Roman way of dressing is, taking all things into the account, as good as any, and, if not more graceful, a thousand times more convenient, wholesome, comfortable, and manageable than Helen's, still it does seem, that, when one steps out of the ordinary area of Roman life and assumes an abnormal position, one might, without violence, assume temporarily an abnormal dress, and refresh our dilated eyes once more with flowing, wavy outlines. Music is one of the eternities: why should not its accessories be? Why should a discord disturb the eye, when only concords delight the ear?