"I suppose," Marise went on, "that I ought not to let that part of it
spoil concert music for me. And it doesn't, of course. I've had some
wonderful times . . . people who play in orchestra and make chamber-music
are the real thing. But the music you make yourself . . . the music we
make up here . . . well, perhaps my taste for it is like one's liking
(some people call it perverse) for French Primitive painting, or the
something so awfully touching and heart-felt that was lost when the
Renaissance came up over the Alps with all its knowingness."

"You're not pretending that you get Vermonters to make music?" protested
Marsh, highly amused at the notion.

"I don't know," she admitted, "whether it is music or not. But it is
something alive." She fell into a muse, "Queer, what a spider-web of
tenuous complication human relationships are. I never would have
thought, probably, of trying anything of the sort if it hadn't been for
a childhood recollection. . . . French incarnation this time," she said
lightly to Marsh. "When I was a little girl, a young priest, just a
young parish priest, in one of the poor hill-parishes of the Basque
country, began to teach the people of his parish really to sing some of
the church chants. I never knew much about the details of what he did,
and never spoke to him in my life, but from across half the world he has
reached out to touch this cornet of America. By the time I was a young
lady, he had two or three big country choruses under his direction. We
used to drive up fist to one and then to another of those hill-towns,
all white-washed houses and plane-tree atriums, and sober-eyed Basques,
to hear them sing. It was beautiful. I never have had a more complete
expression of beauty in all my life. It seemed to me the very soul of
music; those simple people singing, not for pay, not for notoriety, out