It was Mrs. Mason who first asked that Paula play; but it was Terrence McFane and Aaron Hancock who evicted¹ the rag-time group from the piano and sent Theodore Malken, a blushing ambassador, to escort Paula.  
“‘Tis for the confounding of this pagan that I’m askin’ you to play ‘Reflections on the Water,’” Graham heard Terrence say to her.
 
“And ‘The Girl with Flaxen Hair,’ after, please,” begged Hancock, the indicted² pagan. “It will aptly prove my disputation. This wild Celt has a bog-theory of music that predates the cave-man—­and he has the unadulterated stupidity to call himself ultra-modern.”
 
“Oh, Debussy!” Paula laughed. “Still wrangling³ over him, eh? I’ll try and get around to him. But I don’t know with what I’ll begin.”
 
Dar Hyal joined the three sages⁴ in seating Paula at the concert grand which, Graham decided⁵, was none too great for the great room. But no sooner was she seated than the three sages slipped away to what were evidently their chosen listening places. The young poet stretched himself prone⁶ on a deep bearskin forty feet from the piano, his hands buried in his hair. Terrence and Aaron lolled into a cushioned embrasure of a window seat, sufficiently⁷ near to each other to nudge the points of their respective contentions⁸ as Paula might expound⁹ them. The girls were huddled¹⁰ in colored groups on wide couches or garlanded in twos and threes on and in the big koa-wood chairs.
 
Evan Graham half-started forward to take the honor of turning Paula’s music, but saw in time that Dar Hyal had already elected to himself that office. Graham glimpsed the scene with quiet curious glances. The grand piano, under a low arch at the far-end of the room, was cunningly raised and placed as on and in a sounding board. All jollity and banter¹¹ had ceased. Evidently, he thought, the Little Lady had a way with her and was accepted as a player of parts. And from this he was perversely¹² prepared for disappointment.
 
Ernestine leaned across from a chair to whisper to him:
 
“She can do anything she wants to do. And she doesn’t work . . . much. She studied under Leschetizky and Madame Carreno, you know, and she abides¹³ by their methods. She doesn’t play like a woman, either. Listen to that!”
 
Graham knew that he expected disappointment from her confident hands, even as she rippled¹⁴ them over the keys in little chords and runs with which he could not quarrel but which he had heard too often before from technically¹⁵ brilliant but musically mediocre¹⁶ performers. But whatever he might have fancied she would play, he was all unprepared for Rachmaninoff’s sheerly masculine Prelude¹⁷, which he had heard only men play when decently played.
 
She took hold of the piano, with the first two ringing bars, masterfully, like a man; she seemed to lift it, and its sounding wires, with her two hands, with the strength and certitude of maleness. And then, as only he had heard men do it, she sank, or leaped—­he could scarcely say which—­to the sureness and pureness and ineffable¹⁸ softness of the Andante following.
 
She played on, with the calm and power of anything but the little, almost girlish woman he glimpsed through half-closed lids across the ebony board of the enormous piano, which she commanded, as she commanded herself, as she commanded the composer. Her touch was definite, authoritative¹⁹, was his judgment²⁰, as the Prelude faded away in dying chords hauntingly reminiscent of its full vigor²¹ that seemed still to linger in the air.
 
While Aaron and Terrence debated in excited whispers in the window seat, and while Dar Hyal sought other music at Paula’s direction, she glanced at Dick, who turned off bowl after bowl of mellow²² light till Paula sat in an oasis²³ of soft glow that brought out the dull gold lights in her dress and hair.
 
Graham watched the lofty room grow loftier in the increasing shadows. Eighty feet in length, rising two stories and a half from masonry²⁴ walls to tree-trunked roof, flung across with a flying gallery from the rail of which hung skins of wild animals, hand-woven blankets of Oaxaca and Ecuador, and tapas, woman-pounded and vegetable-dyed, from the islands of the South Pacific, Graham knew it for what it was—­a feast-hall of some medieval castle; and almost he felt a poignant²⁵ sense of lack of the long spread table, with pewter below the salt and silver above the salt, and with huge hound-dogs scuffling beneath for bones.
 
Later, when Paula had played sufficient Debussy to equip Terrence and Aaron for fresh war, Graham talked with her about music for a few vivid moments. So well did she prove herself aware of the philosophy of music, that, ere he knew it, he was seduced²⁶ into voicing his own pet theory.
 
“And so,” he concluded, “the true psychic²⁷ factor of music took nearly three thousand years to impress itself on the Western mind. Debussy more nearly attains²⁸ the idea-engendering and suggestive serenity—­say of the time of Pythagoras—­than any of his fore-runners—­”
 
Here, Paula put a pause in his summary by beckoning²⁹ over Terrence and Aaron from their battlefield in the windowseat.
 
“Yes, and what of it?” Terrence was demanding, as they came up side by side. “I defy you, Aaron, I defy you, to get one thought out of Bergson on music that is more lucid³⁰ than any thought he ever uttered in his ‘Philosophy of Laughter,’ which is not lucid at all.”
 
“Oh!—­listen!” Paula cried, with sparkling eyes. “We have a new prophet. Hear Mr. Graham. He’s worthy³¹ of your steel, of both your steel. He agrees with you that music is the refuge from blood and iron and the pounding of the table. That weak souls, and sensitive souls, and high-pitched souls flee from the crassness³² and the rawness of the world to the drug-dreams of the over-world of rhythm and vibration—­”
 
“Atavistic!” Aaron Hancock snorted. “The cave-men, the monkey-folk, and the ancestral bog-men of Terrence did that sort of thing—­”
 
“But wait,” Paula urged. “It’s his conclusions and methods and processes. Also, there he disagrees with you, Aaron, fundamentally. He quoted Pater’s ’that all art aspires³³ toward music’—­”
 
“Pure prehuman and micro-organic chemistry,” Aaron broke in. “The reactions of cell-elements to the doggerel³⁴ punch of the wave-lengths of sunlight, the foundation of all folk-songs and rag-times. Terrence completes his circle right there and stultifies³⁵ all his windiness. Now listen to me, and I will present—­”
 
“But wait,” Paula pleaded. “Mr. Graham argues that English puritanism barred music, real music, for centuries....”
 
“True,” said Terrence.
 
“And that England had to win to its sensuous³⁶ delight in rhythm through Milton and Shelley—­”
 
“Who was a metaphysician.” Aaron broke in.
 
“A lyrical metaphysician,” Terrence defined instantly. “That you must acknowledge, Aaron.”
 
“And Swinburne?” Aaron demanded, with a significance that tokened former arguments.
 
“He says Offenbach was the fore-runner of Arthur Sullivan,” Paula cried challengingly. “And that Auber was before Offenbach. And as for Wagner, ask him, just ask him—­”
 
And she slipped away, leaving Graham to his fate. He watched her, watched the perfect knee-lift of her draperies as she crossed to Mrs. Mason and set about arranging bridge quartets, while dimly he could hear Terrence beginning:
 
“It is agreed that music was the basis of inspiration of all the arts of the Greeks....”
 
Later, when the two sages were obliviously³⁷ engrossed³⁸ in a heated battle as to whether Berlioz or Beethoven had exposited in their compositions the deeper intellect, Graham managed his escape. Clearly, his goal was to find his hostess again. But she had joined two of the girls in the whispering, giggling³⁹ seclusiveness of one of the big chairs, and, most of the company being deep in bridge, Graham found himself drifted into a group composed of Dick Forrest, Mr. Wombold, Dar Hyal, and the correspondent of the Breeders’ Gazette.
 
“I’m sorry you won’t be able to run over with me,” Dick was saying to the correspondent. “It would mean only one more day. I’ll take you tomorrow.”
 
“Sorry,” was the reply. “But I must make Santa Rosa. Burbank has promised me practically a whole morning, and you know what that means. Yet I know the Gazette would be glad for an account of the experiment. Can’t you outline it?—­briefly^............