through her. "Lean toward him, if so you will, and place your two hands
upon his neck!" She wanted to cry out at the recklessness of the
thought, and in vain she appraised her own cleanness and culture and
balanced all that she was against what he was not. She glanced about her
and saw the others gazing at him with rapt attention; and she would have
despaired had not she seen horror in her mother's eyes--fascinated
horror, it was true, but none the less horror. This man from outer
darkness was evil. Her mother saw it, and her mother was right. She
would trust her mother's judgment in this as she had always trusted it in
all things. The fire of him was no longer warm, and the fear of him was
no longer poignant.

Later, at the piano, she played for him, and at him, aggressively, with
the vague intent of emphasizing the impassableness of the gulf that
separated them. Her music was a club that she swung brutally upon his
head; and though it stunned him and crushed him down, it incited him. He
gazed upon her in awe. In his mind, as in her own, the gulf widened; but
faster than it widened, towered his ambition to win across it. But he
was too complicated a plexus of sensibilities to sit staring at a gulf a
whole evening, especially when there was music. He was remarkably
susceptible to music. It was like strong drink, firing him to audacities
of feeling,--a drug that laid hold of his imagination and went
cloud-soaring through the sky. It banished sordid fact, flooded his mind
with beauty, loosed romance and to its heels added wings. He did not
understand the music she played. It was different from the dance-hall
piano-banging and blatant brass bands he had heard. But he had caught
hints of such music from the books, and he accepted her playing largely
on faith, patiently waiting, at first, for the lifting measures of
pronounced and simple rhythm, puzzled because those measures were not
long continued. Just as he caught the swing of them and started, his