a sort of musical requiem.  Sylvia mustn’t miss it; you take her.  And here,” he spun round to face Judith and Lawrence, producing another slim, tiny envelope from the other upper waistcoat pocket, “since symphony concerts are rather solid meat for milk teeth, and since they last till way after bedtime, I have provided another sort of entertainment; to wit:  three seats for moving pictures of the only real and authentic Cheyenne Bill’s Congress of the World’s Frontiersmen.  All in favor of going there with me, say ‘Aye.’”

“Aye!” screamed Judith and Lawrence.  Everybody laughed in pleased excitement and everybody seemed satisfied except Mrs. Marshall, who insisted that she should go to the moving pictures while the Professor took Sylvia to the concert.

Then followed the most amiable, generous wrangle as to which of the parents should enjoy the adult form of amusement.  But while the Professor grew more and more half-hearted in his protestations that he really didn’t care where he went, Mrs. Marshall grew more and more positive that he must not be allowed to miss the music, finally silencing his last weak proffer of self-abnegation by saying peremptorily:  “No, no, Elliott; go on in to your debauch of emotion.  I’ll take the children.  Don’t miss your chance.  You know it means ten times as much to you as to me.  You haven’t heard a good orchestra in years.”

Sylvia had never been in such a huge hall as the one where they presently sat, high, giddily high in the eyrie of a top gallery.  They looked down into yawning space.  The vast size of the auditorium so dwarfed the people now taking their innumerable seats, that even after the immense audience was assembled the great semicircular enclosure seemed empty and blank.  It received those thousands of souls into its maw, and made no sign; awaiting some visitation worthy of its bulk.

The orchestra, an army of ants, straggled out on the stage.  Sylvia was astonished at their numbers—­sixteen first violins, she saw by the program!  She commented to her father on the difficulty of keeping them all in tune.  He smiled at her absently, bade her, with an air of suppressed excitement, wait until she had heard them, and fell to biting his nails nervously.  She re-read the program and all the advertisements, hypnotized, like every one else in the audience, by the sight of printed matter.  She noticed that the first number of this memorial concert was the funeral march from the Goetterdaemmerung, which she knew very well from having heard a good many times a rather thin version of it for four strings and a piano.

The conductor, a solitary ant, made his toilsome way across the great front of the stage, evoking a burst of applause, which resounded hollowly in the inhuman spaces of the building.  He mounted a step, waved his antennae, there was a great indrawn breath of silence, and then Sylvia, waiting with agreeable curiosity to hear how a big orchestra would really sound, gasped and held her breath.  The cup of that vast building suddenly brimmed with a magical flood of pure tone, coming from everywhere, from nowhere, from her own heart as well as from outside her body.  The immense hall rang to the glorious quality of this sound as a violin-back vibrates to the drawn bow.  It rained down on her, it surged up to her, she could not believe that she really heard it.