than the banjo, but you got to have the voice with that song if you’re meaning to do any crooked work.  Nettie was much taken with it even so, and Wilbur played it another way.  What he said was that it was another school of interpretation.  It seemed to have its points with him, though he favoured the first school, he said, because of a certain almost rugged fidelity.  He said the other school was marked by a tendency to idealism, and he pulled some of the handles to show how it was done.  I’m merely telling you how Wilbur talked.

“Nettie listened very serious.  There was a new look in her eyes.  ’That song has got to her even on a machinery piano,’ I says, ’but wait till we get the voice, with she and Chester out in the mischievous moonlight.’  Wasn’t I the wily old hound!  Nettie sort of lingered to hear Wilbur, who was going good by this time.  ’One must be the soul behind the wood and wire,’ he says; ’one rather feels just that, or one remains merely a brutal mechanic.’

“‘I understand,’ says Nettie.  ‘How you must have studied!’

“‘Oh, studied!’ says Wilbur, and tossed his mane back and laughed in a lofty and suffering manner.  Studied!  He’d gone one year to a business college in Seattle after he got out of high school!

“‘I understand,’ says Nettie, looking all reverent and buffaloed.

“‘It is the price one must pay for technique,’ says Wilbur.  ’And to-day you found me in the mood.  I am not always in the mood.’

“‘I understand,’ says Nettie.

“I’m just giving you an idea, understand.  Then Wilbur says, ’I will bring these records up this evening if I may.  The mezzo-soprano requires a radically different adjustment from the barytone.’  ‘My God!’ thinks I, ‘has he got technique on the phonograph, too!’ But I says he must come by all means, thinking he could tend the machine while Nettie and Chester is out on the porch getting wise to each other.

“‘There’s another teep for you,’ I says to Nettie when we got out of the place.  ‘He certainly is marked by tendencies,’ I says.  I meant it for a nasty slam at Wilbur’s painful deficiencies as a human being, but she took it as serious as Wilbur took himself—­which is some!

“‘Ah, yes, the artist teep,’ says she,’the most complex, the most baffling of all.’

“That was a kind of a sickish jolt to me—­the idea that something as low in the animal kingdom as Wilbur could baffle anyone—­but I thinks, ’Shucks!  Wait till he lines up alongside of a regular human man like Chet Timmins!’

“I had Chet up to supper again.  He still choked on words of one syllable if Nettie so much as glanced at him, and turned all sorts of painful colours like a cheap rug.  But I keep thinking the piece will fix that all right.