“It was a mistake,” he said aloud, in a decided, clearly modulated voice, gazing blankly into the warm stillness of the room.  It had come partly from his innate impatience with any inferior state whatever, and part from the old inability to identify himself with the practicalities of existence.  He had always viewed with distaste the apparently necessary compromises of successful living; the struggle for money, commercial supremacy, seemed unendurably ugly; the jargon and subterfuges of financial competition beneath his exacting standard of personal dignity.  That had been his expression at the time—­permeated by an impatient sense of superiority; but now he felt that there was something essential lacking in himself.  An absence of proper balance.  Solely concerned with the appearance, the insignificant surface, of such efforts as Bundy Provost’s, their moving, masculine spirit had evaded him.  Yes, it had been a mistake.  He had missed the greatest pleasure of all, that of accumulating power and influence, of virile achievement.

Well, it was over now; he was old; his life, his chance, had gone; and all that remained were memories of Patti smiling disdainfully in the flare of oil torches about her carriage; the only concrete record of so many years the scrap books such as that on his knees.

It had been an error; yet there had been, within him, no choice, no intimation of a different, more desirable, consummation.  Bundy had gone one way and himself another in obedience to forces beyond their understanding or control.  They had done, briefly, what they were.  There was no individual blame to attach, no applause; spare moralizing to append.  He returned to the pages before him, to the memories of the radiant Ambre and Marimon, the sylvan echoes of Campanini singing Elvino.

Now his recovered glass was intent on a programme of the rapidly successful Metropolitan forces, of the new German Opera, with Seidl-Krauss singing Elizabeth, and Brandt in Fidelio.  Even here, after so long, he vibrated again to the exquisite beauty of Lenore’s constancy and love.  Then Dr. Damrosch dead, the sonorous funeral in the Opera House ...  That had been changed with the rest; the baignoires were gone, the tiers of boxes newly curved; gone the chandeliers and Turkey red carpet and gold threaded brocade that had seemed the final expression of luxury.  Lehmann in the premier of Tristan und Isolde, with the vast restrained enthusiasm and tensity when, at the end of the third act, Niemann bared his wounded breast.  Eames’ rise; but that, and what followed, were in successive books.  He closed the one under his hand.