“Look how solemn he is, like he was thinking of something a million miles away except how lucky he is he should have a pink birthday-cake!  Uh—­uh—­uh!  Don’t you begin to holler again—­Here, I’m putting the feedle next to you—­uh—­uh—­uh!”

To a meal plentifully ladled out directly from stove to table, the Kantor family drew up, dipping first into the rich black soup of the occasion.  All except Mrs. Kantor.

“Esther, you dish up; I’m going somewhere.  I’ll be back in a minute.”

“Where you going, Sarah?  Won’t it keep until—­”

But even in the face of query, Sarah Kantor was two flights down and well through the lambent aisles of the copper shop.  Outside, she broke into a run, through two blocks of the indescribable bazaar atmosphere of Grand Street, then one block to the right.

Before Naftel’s show-window, a jet of bright gas burned into a jibberwock land of toys.  There was that in Sarah Kantor’s face that was actually lyrical, as, fumbling at the bosom of her dress, she entered.

To Leon Kantor, by who knows what symphonic scheme of things, life was a chromatic scale, yielding up to him through throbbing, living nerves of sheep-gut, the sheerest semitones of man’s emotions.

When he tucked his Stradivarius beneath his chin, the Book of Life seemed suddenly translated to him in melody.  Even Sarah Kantor, who still brewed for him, on a small portable stove carried from city to city and surreptitiously unpacked in hotel suites, the blackest of soups, and, despite his protestation, would incase his ears of nights in an old home-made device against their flightiness, would often times bleed inwardly at this sense of his isolation.

There was a realm into which he went alone, leaving her as detached as the merest ticket purchaser at the box-office.

At seventeen, Leon Kantor had played before the crowned heads of Europe, the aching heads of American capital, and even the shaved head of a South Sea prince.  There was a layout of anecdotal gifts, from the molar tooth of the South Sea prince set in a South Sea pearl to a blue-enamelled snuff-box encrusted with the rearing-lion coat of arms of a very royal house.

At eighteen, came the purchase of a king’s Stradivarius for a king’s ransom, and acclaimed by Sunday supplements to repose of nights in an ivory cradle.

At nineteen, under careful auspices of press-agent, the ten singing digits of the son of Abrahm Kantor were insured at ten thousand dollars the finger.

At twenty, he had emerged surely and safely from the perilous quicksands which have sucked down whole Lilliputian worlds of infant prodigies.

At twenty-one, when Leon Kantor played a Sunday-night concert, there was a human queue curling entirely around the square block of the opera-house, waiting its one, two, even three and four hours for the privilege of standing-room only.