She had neither capacity for
exactitude nor tireless fidelity to tone. It made her neck ache. She had
never graduated from musical sensation to cerebration; a theme washed
her over with all the voluptuous abandon of a Henner sea siren letting
the water tickling up the beach to roll over her lightly.
There was unrest in the balcony because Faust was singing through
laryngitis and a cloud of fog in his throat. A critic who wrote in terms
of elliptical rhythms and tonal arabesques tiptoed out for a smoke. One
of those sympathetic fits of coughing swept the house. But Lilly sat
hunched in her habitual beatific attitude against the chair back, the
old opera flowing back to her in association that caught her at
the tonsils.
"Lilly, play that over, the left hand alone."
"Oh, mamma, mamma!"
That blue challis wrapper shotted with pink rosebuds.
"Lilly, play that over."
Eames down there flinging up the "Jewel Song" like a curve of gold. Her
place!
She half rose to her feet.
Down in front!
She sat again, but a sudden, an inexplicable sense of wanting to plunge
from the height of the balcony seized her.
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