life is open and accessible, and romances seem to be furnished real
and gratis, in order to save, in a languor-breeding climate, the
ennui of reading and writing books. Each woman has a different way of
picking up and relating her stories, as each one selects different
pieces, and has a personal way of playing them on the piano.

Each story _is_ different, or appears so to her; each has some unique
and peculiar pathos in it. And so she dramatizes and inflects it,
trying to make the point visible to her apparent also to her hearers.
Sometimes the pathos and interest to the hearers lie only in
this--that the relater has observed it, and gathered it, and finds it
worth telling. For do we not gather what we have not, and is not our
own lacking our one motive? It may be so, for it often appears so.

And if a child inside be wakeful and precocious it is not dreams
alone that take on reflections from the balcony outside: through the
half-open shutters the still, quiet eyes look across the dim forms
on the balcony to the star-spangled or the moon-brightened heavens
beyond; while memory makes stores for the future, and germs are sown,
out of which the slow, clambering vine of thought issues, one day, to
decorate or hide, as it may be, the structures or ruins of life.




A DRAMA OF THREE


It was a regular dramatic performance every first of the month in the
little cottage of the old General and Madame B----.