The din was tremendous.  After passages of dark music, in which the formless ugly reigned, occurred the poetic duel between Sordello and Eglamor at Palma’s Court of Love.  But why all this stress and fury?  On the pianoforte the delicate episode sounded gratefully; with the thick riotous orchestration came a disillusioning transformation.  There was noise without power, there was sensuality that strove to imitate the tenderness of passion; and she had fancied it a cloudy garden of love.  Alixe raised an involuntary hand to her ear.

“Yes,” whispered the critic, “I warned him not to use his colours with a trowel.  His theme is not big enough to stand it.”  He lifted thin eyebrows and to her overheated brain was an unexpected Mephisto.  Then the music whirled her away to Italy; the love scene of Palma and Sordello.  It should have been the apex of the work.

“Sounds too much like Tschaikowsky’s Francesca da Rimini,” interrupted Rentgen.  She was annoyed.

“Why didn’t you tell Van Kuyp before he scored the work?” she demanded, her long gray eyes beginning to blacken.

“I did, my dear lady, I did.  But you know what musicians are—­” He shrugged a conclusion with his narrow shoulders.  Alixe coldly regarded him.  There was something new and dangerous in his attitude to her husband’s music this evening.

Her heart began to beat heavily.  What if her suspicions were but the advance guard of a painful truth!  What if this keen analyst of other men’s ideas—­she dared not finish the thought.  With a sluggish movement the music uncoiled itself like a huge boa about to engulf a tiny rabbit.  The simile forced itself against her volition; all this monstrous preparation for a—­rabbit!  In a concert-hall the poetic idea of the tone-poem was petty.  And the churning of the orchestra, foaming hysteria of the strings, bellowing of the brass—­would they never cease!  Such an insane chase after a rabbit!  Yes, she said the word to herself and found her lips carved into a hard smile, which she saw reflected as in a trick mirror upon the face of Elvard Rentgen. He understood.

Of little avail Sordello’s frantic impotencies.  She saw through the rhetorical trickeries of the music, weighed its cheap splendours, realized the mediocrity of this second-rate poet turned symphonist.  Image after image pressed upon her brain, each more pessimistic, more depressing than its predecessor.  Alixe could have wept.  Her companion placed his hand on her arm.  His fingers burned; she moved, but she felt his will controlling her mood.  With high relief she heard the music end.  There was conventional applause.  Alixe restlessly peered into the auditorium.  Again she saw opera-glasses turned toward the box.  “Our good friends,” she rather bitterly thought.  Rentgen recognized her mental turmoil.

“Don’t worry,” he said soothingly.  “It will be all right to-morrow morning.  What I write will make the fortune of the composition.”  He did not utter this vaingloriously, but as a man who stated simple truth.  She gazed at him, her timidity and nervousness returning in full tide.