was almost nameless, tall, very young, with the seedlings of a moustache
and a space of nude calf between his knickerbockers and his socks. He was
very ceremonious, shy, ungainly and blushful. He played a fair-to-middling
game; and nothing more need be said of him.

Musa by contrast was an accomplished man of the world, and the fact that
the fourth obviously regarded him as a hero helped Musa to behave in a
manner satisfactory to himself in front of these English and American
women, so strange, so exotic, so kind, and so disconcerting. Musa looked
upon Britain as a romantic isle where people died for love. And as for
America, in his mind it was as sinister, as wondrous, and as fatal as the
Indies might seem to a bank clerk in Bradford. He had need of every moral
assistance in this or any other social ordeal. For, though he was still the
greatest violinist in Paris, and perhaps in the world, he could not yet
prove this profound truth by the only demonstration which the world
accepts.

If he played in studios he was idolised. If he played at small concerts in
unknown halls he was received with rapture. But he was never lionised. The
great concert halls never saw him on their platforms; his name was never in
the newspapers; and hospitable personages never fought together for his
presence at their tables, even if occasionally they invited him to perform
for charity in return for a glass of claret and a sandwich. Monsieur
Dauphin had attempted to force the invisible barriers for him, but without
success. All his admirers in the Quarter stuck to it that he was in the
rank of Kreisler and Ysaye; at the same time they were annoyed with him
inasmuch as he did not force the world to acknowledge the prophetic good
taste of the Quarter. And Musa made mistakes. He ought to have arrived at
studios in a magnificent automobile, and to have given superb and
uproarious repasts, and to have rendered innumerable women exquisitely