III

That night in an attic-like room of an old building opposite Morningside
Park a tiny supper-table for two stood ready in the middle of the floor;
the supper itself, the entire meal, was spread. There is a victory which
human nature in thousands of lives daily wins over want, that though it
cannot drive poverty from the scene, it can hide its desolation by the
genius of choice and of touch. A battle of that brave and desperate kind
had been won in this garret. Lacking every luxury, it had the charm of
tasteful bareness, of exquisite penury. The supper-table of cheap wood
roughly carpentered was hidden under a piece of fine long-used
table-linen; into the gleaming damask were wrought clusters of
snowballs. The glare of a plain glass lamp was softened by a too costly
silk shade. Over the rim of a common vase hung a few daffodils, too
costly daffodils. The supper, frugal to a bargain, tempted the eye and
the appetite by the good sense with which it had been chosen and
prepared. Thus the whole scene betokened human nature at bay but
victorious in the presence of that wolf, whose near-by howl startles the
poor out of their sleep.

Into this empty room sounds penetrated through a door. They proceeded
from piano-keys evidently so old that one wondered whether possibly they
had not begun to be played on in the days of Beethoven, whether they
were not such as were new on the clavichord of Bach. The fingers that
pressed them were unmistakably those of a child. As the hands wandered
up and down the keyboard, the ear now and then took notice of a broken
string. There were many of these broken strings. The instrument plainly
announced itself to be a remote, well-nigh mythical ancestor of the
modern piano, preternaturally lingering on amid an innumerable deafening
progeny. It suggested a superannuated human being whose loudest