"Pah!" said an old cabotin, after one of these word-pictures. "This war is the last spasm of the world's barbarity. Human nature will finish with it this time. . . . Let us talk of the women we have loved. I knew a splendid creature once--she had golden hair, I remember--" One of these shabby old gentlemen touched me on the arm. "Would Monsieur care to have a little music? It is quite close here, and very beautiful. It helps one to forget the war, and all its misery." I accepted the invitation. I was more thirsty for music than for vin ordinaire or cordiale Médoc. Yet I did not expect very much round the corner of a restaurant frequented by shabby intellectuals... That was my English stupidity. A little group of us went through a dark courtyard lit by a high dim lantern, touching a sculptured figure in a far recess. "Pas de bruit," whispered a voice through the gloom. Up four flights of wooden stairs we came to the door of a flat which was opened by a bearded man holding a lamp. "Soyez les bienvenus!" he said, with a strongly foreign accent. It was queer, the contrast between the beauty of his salon into which we went and the crudeness of the restaurant from which we had come. It was a long room, with black wall-paper, and at the far end of it was a shaded lamp on a grand piano. There was no other light, and the faces of the people in the room, the head of a Greek god on a pedestal, some little sculptured figures on an oak table, and some portrait studies on the walls, were dim and vague until my eyes became accustomed to this yellowish twilight. No word was spoken as we entered, and took a chair if we could find one. None of the company here seemed surprised at this entry of strangers--for two of us were that--or even conscious of it. A tall, clean-shaven young man with a fine, grave face--certainly not French--was playing the violin, superbly; I could not see the man at the piano who touched the keys with such tenderness. Opposite me was another young man, with the curly hair and long, thin face of a Greek faun nursing a violoncello, and listening with a dream in his eyes. A woman with the beauty of some northern race sat in an oak chair with carved arms, which she clasped tightly. I saw the sparkle of a ring on her right hand. The stone had caught a ray from the lamp and was alive with light. Other people with strange, interesting faces were grouped about this salon, absorbed in that music of the violin, which played something of spring, so lightly, so delicately, that our spirit danced to it, and joy came into one's senses as on a sunlit day, when the wind is playing above fields of flowers. Afterwards the cellist drew long, deep chords from his great instrument, and his thin fingers quivered against the thick strings, and made them sing grandly and nobly. Then the man at the piano played alone, after five minutes of silence, in which a few words were spoken, about some theme which would work out with strange effects.