In after years Marie Louise and this man Davidge would see something mystic and intended in the meeting that was to be the detached prologue of their after conflicts. They would quite misremember what really happened--which was, that she retained no impression of him at all, and that he called himself a fool for mixing her with a girl he had met years and years before for just a moment, and had never forgotten because he had not known her well enough to forget her. He had reason enough to distrust his sanity for staring at a resplendent creature in a London drawing-room and imagining for a moment that she was a long-lost, long-sought girl of old dreams--a girl he had seen in a cheap vaudeville theater in a Western state. She was one of a musical team that played all sorts of instruments--xylophones, saxophones, trombones, accordions, cornets, comical instruments concealed in hats and umbrellas. This girl had played each of them in turn, in solo or with the rest of the group. The other mummers were coarse and vaude-vulgar, but she had captivated Davidge with her wild beauty, her magnetism, and the strange cry she put into her music. When she played the trombone she looked to him like one of the angels on a cathedral trumpeting an apocalyptic summons to the dead to bloom from their graves. When she played the cornet it was with a superhuman tone that shook his emotions almost insufferably. She had sung, too, in four voices--in an imitation of a bass, a tenor, a contralto, and finally as a lyric soprano, then skipping from one to the other. They called her "Mamise, the Quartet in One." Davidge had thought her marvelous and had asked the manager of the theater to introduce him. The manager thought him a young fool, and Davidge had felt himself one when he went back to the dingy stage, where he found Mamise among a troupe of trained animals waiting to go on. She was teasing a chittering, cigar-smoking trained ape on a bicycle, and she proved to be an extraordinarily ordinary, painfully plebeian girl, common in voice and diction, awkward and rather contemptuous of the stage-door Johnnie. Davidge had never ceased to blush, and blushed again now, when he recalled his labored compliment, "I expect to see your name in the electric lights some of these days--or nights, Miss Mamise." She had grumbled, "Much ubbliged!" and returned to the ape, while Davidge slunk away, ashamed.