“I will read you what she wrote when she was studying ‘Fidelio’:  ’Beethoven’s music has nothing in common with the passion of the flesh; it lives in the realms of noble affections, pity, tenderness, love, spiritual yearnings for the life beyond the world, and its joy in the external world is as innocent as a happy child’s.  It is in this sense classical—­it lives and loves and breathes in spheres of feeling and thought removed from the ordinary life of men.  Wagner’s later work, if we except some scenes from “The Ring”—­notably the scenes between Wotan and Brunnhilde—­is nearer to the life of the senses; its humanity is fresh in us, deep as Brunnhilde’s; but essential man lives in the spirit.  The desire of the flesh is more necessary to the life of the world than the aspirations of the soul, yet the aspirations of the soul are more human.  The root is more necessary to the plant than its flower, but it is by the flower and not by the root that we know it.”

“Is it not amazing that a woman who could think like that should be capable of flinging up her art—­the art which I gave her—­on account of the preaching of that wooden-headed Mostyn?” Sitting down suddenly he opened a drawer, and, taking out her photograph, he said:  “Here she is as Leonore, but you should have seen her in the part.  The photograph gives no idea whatever; you haven’t seen her picture.  Come, let me show you her picture:  one of the most beautiful pictures that ——­ ever painted; the most beautiful in the room, and there are many beautiful things in this room.  Isn’t it extraordinary that a woman so beautiful, so gifted, so enchanting, so intended by life for life should be taken with the religious idea suddenly?  She has gone mad without doubt.  A woman who could do the things that she could do to pass over to religion, to scapulars, rosaries, indulgencies!  My God! my God!” and he fell back in his armchair, and did not speak again for a long time.  Getting up suddenly, he said, “If you want to smoke any more there are cigars on the table; I am going to bed.”

“Well, it is hard upon him,” Ulick said as he took a cigar; and lighting his candle, he wandered up the great green staircase by himself, seeking the room he had been given at the end of one of the long corridors.

XII

“Did it ever occur to you,” Owen said one evening, as the men sat smoking after dinner, after the servant had brought in the whisky and seltzer, between eleven and twelve, in that happy hour when the spirit descends and men and women sitting together are taken with a desire to communicate the incommunicable part of themselves—­“did it ever occur to you,” Owen said, blowing the smoke and sipping his whisky and seltzer from time to time, “that man is the most ridiculous animal on the face of this earth?”

“You include women?” Ulick asked.