the photograph when I shut the door on 'em. 'The soul behind the wood
and wire,' she murmurs. I looked closer then and what do you reckon it
was? Just as true as I set here, it was Wilbur, leaning forward all
negligent and patronizing on a twelve-hundred-dollar grand piano, his
hair well forward and his eyes masterful, like that there noble
instrument was his bond slave. But wait! And underneath he'd writ a bar
of music with notes running up and down, and signed his name to it--not
plain, mind you, though he can write a good business hand if he wants
to, but all scrawly like some one important, so you couldn't tell if it
was meant for Dutch or English. Could you beat that for nerve--in a day,
in a million years?

"'What's Wilbur writing that kind of music for?' I asks in a cold voice.
'He don't know that kind. What he had ought to of written is a bunch of
them hollow slats and squares like they punch in the only kind of music
he plays,' I says.

"'Hush!' says Nettie. 'It's that last divine phrase, "To kiss the
cross!"'

"I choked up myself then. And I went to bed and thought. And this is
what I thought: When you think you got the winning hand, keep on
raising. To call is to admit you got no faith in your judgment. Better
lay down than call. So I resolve not to say another word to the girl
about Chester, but simply to press the song in on her. Already it had
made her act like a human person. Of course I didn't worry none about
Wilbur. The wisdom of the ages couldn't have done that. But I seen I had
got to have a real first-class human voice in that song, like the one I
had heard in New York City. They'll just have to clench, I think, when
they hear a good A-number-one voice in it.