imagination attuned in flight, always they vanished away in a chaotic
scramble of sounds that was meaningless to him, and that dropped his
imagination, an inert weight, back to earth.

Once, it entered his mind that there was a deliberate rebuff in all this.
He caught her spirit of antagonism and strove to divine the message that
her hands pronounced upon the keys. Then he dismissed the thought as
unworthy and impossible, and yielded himself more freely to the music.
The old delightful condition began to be induced. His feet were no
longer clay, and his flesh became spirit; before his eyes and behind his
eyes shone a great glory; and then the scene before him vanished and he
was away, rocking over the world that was to him a very dear world. The
known and the unknown were commingled in the dream-pageant that thronged
his vision. He entered strange ports of sun-washed lands, and trod
market-places among barbaric peoples that no man had ever seen. The
scent of the spice islands was in his nostrils as he had known it on
warm, breathless nights at sea, or he beat up against the southeast
trades through long tropic days, sinking palm-tufted coral islets in the
turquoise sea behind and lifting palm-tufted coral islets in the
turquoise sea ahead. Swift as thought the pictures came and went. One
instant he was astride a broncho and flying through the fairy-colored
Painted Desert country; the next instant he was gazing down through
shimmering heat into the whited sepulchre of Death Valley, or pulling an
oar on a freezing ocean where great ice islands towered and glistened in
the sun. He lay on a coral beach where the cocoanuts grew down to the
mellow-sounding surf. The hulk of an ancient wreck burned with blue
fires, in the light of which danced the hula dancers to the barbaric love-
calls of the singers, who chanted to tinkling ukuleles and rumbling tom-
toms. It was a sensuous, tropic night. In the background a volcano
crater was silhouetted against the stars. Overhead drifted a pale