“Like this?” she said, turning back. And then, having no music in front of her, she played a strange tumultuous Russian thing with extraordinary power. I begged her to go on. Instead she left the piano abruptly and stood for a minute far away at the window with her back to me, breathing rapidly, not from the exertion of playing, I thought, but from the emotional excitement of it. Then she called me to come and look at a group of Sunday strollers passing in the street,--three men and two women, strange, dark aliens full of hot slothful life. The men around their middles wore striped sashes ending in fringe, and no coats, like opera brigands; the women were draped in flaming shawls. All of them wore earrings. “What are they?” she asked. Immigrants, I guessed, from some odd corner of Southern Europe, who hadn’t been here long enough to get out of their native costume. “They will be drab soon enough,” she said, turning away. I wanted to talk of her playing, being now enthusiastic about it, but she put the subject aside, saying, “Please don’t,” and we talked instead of pictures. There was a special exhibition of old masters at the Metropolitan Museum which she hadn’t seen. Wouldn’t I like to go? It came out presently that she painted. I asked to see some of her things and she got them out,--two or three landscapes and some studies of the nude. She had just begun working in a life class, she said. “Very interesting,” I said, trying to get the right emphasis and knowing instantly that it had failed. She gathered them up slowly and put them away. “They are like your playing,” I added, “as you played at first.” “How do you mean?” “I mean you somehow hinder your self-expression.” “I do not let myself go? Is that what you mean?” “Precisely. What are you afraid of?” “Then you believe in letting oneself go?” she asked. “Well, why not?” “Suppose one isn’t sure of one’s stopping places?” We became involved in a discussion of the moralities, hitherto, present and future, tending to become audacious. This is a pastime by means of which, in first acquaintance, two persons of opposite sex may indulge their curiosity with perfect security. The subject is abstract. The tone is impersonal. Neither one knows how far the other will go. They dare each other to follow, one step at a time, and are both surprised at the ground they can make. There is at the same time an inaudible exchange, which is even more thrilling, for that is personal. This need never be acknowledged. If the abstract does not lead naturally to the concrete, then the whole conversation remains impersonal and the inaudible part may be treated as if it had never occurred. That is the basic rule of the game. Her courage amazed me. I began to see what she meant by supposing that one might not be sure of one’s stopping places. She had been reading France, Stendhal, Zola, Shaw, Pater, Ibsen, Strindberg and Nietzsche.