Even the antique harpsichord had its compensations; not so powerful in
its tonal capacity, it nevertheless gave forth a pleading, human quality
like the still small angelic voice. Davos pondered these problems,
pondered Chopin's celestial touch and the weaving magic of his many-hued
poems; Chopin--Keats, Shelley, and Heine battling within the walls of a
frail tender soul.
The sound of footsteps and voices aroused him. He shivered with disgust.
More people! Two men, well advanced in life, followed by two women,
barely attracted his notice, until he saw that the little creature who
waddled at the rear of the party was a Japanese in European clothes.
Notwithstanding her western garb, she resembled a print of Utamaro.
Beside her walked a tall, grave girl, with dark hair and gray eyes,
attired in the quaint garb of some early nineteenth-century epoch--1840
or thereabouts. As old-fashioned as she looked, a delicate girlish
beauty was hers, and when she indifferently gazed at Davos, straightway
he heard humming in his head the "glance motive" from Tristan and
Isolde.
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