He played a few bars of very intricate phrase after the manner of the opening of a fugue. Then in the bass half the phrase was repeated, but it finished with something perfectly different, a third and a fourth or a fifth joined in, and before the “whole kennel was a-yelp” the original subject had passed through rapid gradations until it had become something totally different to what it began with, though still an incessant jabber of cognate phrases, never quite coherent, were somehow strung together and worked against each other by a miracle of ingenuity. Then the original subject was repeated with emphatic insistence, as if to call renewed attention to itself, but it was answered this time by a phrase that had nothing whatever to do with it; a third short melody totally different from anything that had gone before or was to come after ran its brief and ridiculous course, and then a perfect hodge-podge of reminiscences of all that had previously occurred, handled with extraordinary dexterity, made the brain positively reel and swim. Finally a huge bravura passage, as much decked out with ribands and lace as a fashionable woman at a party, brought this insane composition, which taxed even Martin’s fingers, to a totally unexpected close. Karl Rusoff had listened at first with sheer uncomprehending bewilderment, unable, since indeed there was neither head nor tail nor body to it, to make anything whatever out of it, and for a moment he wondered if Martin was merely playing the fool. But as he looked at his face bent over the piano, and saw even his fingers nearly in difficulties, a sudden light struck him, and he began to smile. And before the end was reached he sat shaking in his chair with hopeless laughter. “Ah, you wicked boy,” he said, “why even our dear Lady Sunningdale would recognise herself.” Martin pushed his plume out of his left eye and laughed. “That’s the joy of it,” he said. “She did recognise it. About half way through she said, ‘Why, that’s me.’ You know you told me to do that,--to take anything, the east wind, or a London fog, or a friend, and make music of it.” “Play it once more, if you will,” said Karl, “and then to work. Not that that is no work. There is a great deal of work in that. Also I perceive with secret satisfaction that you do not find it easy to play. But the bravura is rather unkind. She is never quite like that.” “Ah, the bravura is only her clothes,” said Martin, preparing to begin again. “She even told me which hat she had on. It is the one she describes as a covey of birds of paradise which have been out all night in a thunderstorm, sitting on a tomato-salad.”