“You like all this,” he grunted.  “You, a grown woman, a teacher too.”

“I wonder if I do,” she said.  “I guess I’m a queer person, dad, a curious family mixture—­of Laura and Edith and mother and you, with a good deal of myself thrown in.  But it feels rather good to be mixed, don’t you think?  Let’s stay mixed as long as we can—­and keep together the family.”

* * * * *

That afternoon, to distract him, Deborah took her father to a concert in Carnegie Hall.  She had often urged him to go of late, but despite his liking for music Roger had refused before, simply because it was a change.  But why balk at going anywhere now, when Laura was up to such antics at home?

“Do you mind climbing up to the gallery?” Deborah asked as they entered the hall.

“Not at all,” he curtly answered.  He did mind it very much!

“Then we’ll go to the very top,” she said.  “It’s a long climb but I want you to see it.  It’s so different up there.”

“I don’t doubt it,” he replied.  And as they made the slow ascent, pettishly he wondered why Deborah must always be so eager for queer places.  Galleries, zoo schools, tenement slums—­why not take a two dollar seat in life?

Deborah seated him far down in the front of the great gallery, over at the extreme right, and from here they could look back and up at a huge dim arena of faces.

“Now watch them close,” she whispered.  “See what the music does to them.”

As the symphony began below the faces all grew motionless.  And as the music cast its spell, the anxious ruffled feelings which had been with Roger all that day little by little were dispelled, and soon his imagination began to work upon this scene.  He saw many familiar American types.  He felt he knew what they had been doing on Sundays only a few years before.  After church they had eaten large Sunday dinners.  Then some had napped and some had walked and some had gone to Sunday school.  At night they had had cold suppers, and afterwards some had gone back to church; while others, as in Roger’s house in the days when Judith was alive, had gathered around the piano for hymns.  Young men callers, friends of their daughters, had joined in the family singing.  Yes, some of these people had been like that.  To them, a few short years ago, a concert on the Sabbath would have seemed a sacrilege.  He could almost hear from somewhere the echo of “Abide With Me.”

But over this memory of a song rose now the surging music of Tschaikovsky’s “Pathetique.”  And the yearnings and fierce hungers in this tumultuous music swept all the hymns from Roger’s mind.  Once more he watched the gallery, and this time he became aware that more than half were foreigners.  Out of the mass from every side individual faces emerged, swarthy, weird, and staring hungrily into space.  And to Roger the whole shadowy place, the very air, grew pregnant, charged with all these inner lives bound together in this mood, this mystery that had swept over them all, immense and formless, baffling, this furious demanding and this blind wistful groping which he himself had known so well, ever since his wife had died and he had lost his faith in God.  What was the meaning of it all if life were nothing but a start, and there were nothing but the grave?