“Try it on me,” urged Theron, with a twinkling eye.  “Which am I?”

“Both,” said the girl, with a merry nod of the head.  “But now I’ll play.  I told you you were to hear Chopin.  I prescribe him for you.  He is the Greekiest of the Greeks.  There was a nation where all the people were artists, where everybody was an intellectual aristocrat, where the Philistine was as unknown, as extinct, as the dodo.  Chopin might have written his music for them.”

“I am interested in Shopang,” put in Theron, suddenly recalling Sister Soulsby’s confidences as to the source of her tunes.  “He lived with—­what’s his name—­George something.  We were speaking about him only this afternoon.”

Celia looked down into her visitor’s face at first inquiringly, then with a latent grin about her lips.  “Yes—­George something,” she said, in a tone which mystified him.

The Rev. Mr. Ware was sitting up, a minute afterward, in a ferment of awakened consciousness that he had never heard the piano played before.  After a little, he noiselessly rearranged the cushions, and settled himself again in a recumbent posture.  It was beyond his strength to follow that first impulse, and keep his mind abreast with what his ears took in.  He sighed and lay back, and surrendered his senses to the mere unthinking charm of it all.

It was the Fourth Prelude that was singing in the air about him—­a simple, plaintive strain wandering at will over a surface of steady rhythmic movement underneath, always creeping upward through mysteries of sweetness, always sinking again in cadences of semi-tones.  With only a moment’s pause, there came the Seventh Waltz—­a rich, bold confusion which yet was not confused.  Theron’s ears dwelt with eager delight upon the chasing medley of swift, tinkling sounds, but it left his thoughts free.

From where he reclined, he turned his head to scrutinize, one by one, the statues in the corners.  No doubt they were beautiful—­for this was a department in which he was all humility—­and one of them, the figure of a broad-browed, stately, though thick-waisted woman, bending slightly forward and with both arms broken off, was decently robed from the hips downward.  The others were not robed at all.  Theron stared at them with the erratic, rippling jangle of the waltz in his ears, and felt that he possessed a new and disturbing conception of what female emancipation meant in these later days.  Roving along the wall, his glance rested again upon the largest of the Virgin pictures—­a full-length figure in sweeping draperies, its radiant, aureoled head upturned in rapt adoration, its feet resting on a crescent moon which shone forth in bluish silver through festooned clouds of cherubs.  The incongruity between the unashamed statues and this serene incarnation of holy womanhood jarred upon him for the instant.  Then his mind went to the piano.

Without a break the waltz had slowed and expanded into a passage of what might be church music, an exquisitely modulated and gently solemn chant, through which a soft, lingering song roved capriciously, forcing the listener to wonder where it was coming out, even while it caressed and soothed to repose.