His hostess gave the speaker a rather disconcerting stare, hardly explained, he thought, by the enigmatical statement that came after it: "Why, that is how we are living, all of us!" The pianist was an old German, considered eccentric by Endbury. He had a social position on account of his son, a prosperous German-American manufacturer of buggies, and was invited because of his readiness to play on any occasion. The old man looked about him at the company with a fatherly smile, and, sitting down to his instrument, waited pointedly until all the cheerful hum of conversation had died away. The room was profoundly silent as he brought his hands down on the keys in a startling, thrilling chord. Lydia's heart began to beat fast. She felt a chill run among the roots of her hair. She was so moved she could have wept aloud, and yet, almost at once, as the musician passed on to the rich elaboration of his theme, she lost herself in a groping bewilderment. She had heard so little music! Her straining attention mocked her with its futility. She and Paul had been married for eight months, but they had found no time for the serious study of music from which she had hoped so much. When Paul was at home for an evening he was too tired and worn for anything very deep, he said, and preferred to anything else the lighter pieces of Nevin. She now gave ear despairingly to the mighty utterance of a master, catching only now and then a tantalizing glimpse of what it might mean to her. At times, there emerged from the glorious tumult of sound some grave, earnest chord, some quick, piercing melody, some exquisite sudden cadence, which reached her heart intelligibly; but through most of it she felt herself to be listening with heartsick yearning to a lovely message in an unknown tongue. Her feeling of desolate exile from a realm of beauty she longed to enter, was intensified, as was natural in so sensitive a nature, by the strange power of music to heighten in its listeners whatever is, for the time, their predominant emotion. She felt like crying out, like beating her hands against the prison bars suddenly revealed to her. She was almost intolerably affected before the end of the selection. "That's an awfully long piece for anybody to learn by heart!" commented her neighbor admiringly, as the old pianist finished, and stood up wiping his forehead. "Say, Mr. Burkhardt, what's the name of that selection?" he went on, leaning forward. The old German turned toward him, and answered gravely: "That is the feerst mofement of Beethoven's Opus Von Hundred and Elefen." "Oh, it is, is it?" said Lydia's guest, with a facetious intonation. "All of that?"