“You can’t be a great artist without a great passion!” Madame Blumenthal was affirming.  Before I had time to assent Madame Patti’s voice rose wheeling like a skylark, and rained down its silver notes.  “Ah, give me that art,” I whispered, “and I will leave you your passion!” And I departed for my own place in the orchestra.  I wondered afterwards whether the speech had seemed rude, and inferred that it had not on receiving a friendly nod from the lady, in the lobby, as the theatre was emptying itself.  She was on Pickering’s arm, and he was taking her to her carriage.  Distances are short in Homburg, but the night was rainy, and Madame Blumenthal exhibited a very pretty satin-shod foot as a reason why, though but a penniless widow, she should not walk home.  Pickering left us together a moment while he went to hail the vehicle, and my companion seized the opportunity, as she said, to beg me to be so very kind as to come and see her.  It was for a particular reason!  It was reason enough for me, of course, I answered, that she had given me leave.  She looked at me a moment with that extraordinary gaze of hers which seemed so absolutely audacious in its candour, and rejoined that I paid more compliments than our young friend there, but that she was sure I was not half so sincere.  “But it’s about him I want to talk,” she said.  “I want to ask you many things; I want you to tell me all about him.  He interests me; but you see my sympathies are so intense, my imagination is so lively, that I don’t trust my own impressions.  They have misled me more than once!” And she gave a little tragic shudder.

I promised to come and compare notes with her, and we bade her farewell at her carriage door.  Pickering and I remained a while, walking up and down the long glazed gallery of the Kursaal.  I had not taken many steps before I became aware that I was beside a man in the very extremity of love.  “Isn’t she wonderful?” he asked, with an implicit confidence in my sympathy which it cost me some ingenuity to elude.  If he were really in love, well and good!  For although, now that I had seen her, I stood ready to confess to large possibilities of fascination on Madame Blumenthal’s part, and even to certain possibilities of sincerity of which my appreciation was vague, yet it seemed to me less ominous that he should be simply smitten than that his admiration should pique itself on being discriminating.  It was on his fundamental simplicity that I counted for a happy termination of his experiment, and the former of these alternatives seemed to me the simpler.  I resolved to hold my tongue and let him run his course.  He had a great deal to say about his happiness, about the days passing like hours, the hours like minutes, and about Madame Blumenthal being a “revelation.”  “She was nothing to-night,” he said; “nothing to what she sometimes is in the way of brilliancy—­in the way of repartee.  If you could only hear her when she tells her adventures!”