Something inhuman and yet troublingly personal lay in the performance; it invaded the onlookers with a sense of disquietude.  There was primeval ecstasy in those strains and gestures.  Giant moths, meanwhile, fluttered overhead, rattling their frail wings against the framework of the paper lanterns; the south wind passed through the garden like the breath of a friend, bearing the aromatic burden of a thousand night-blooming shrubs and flowers.  Young people, meeting here, would greet one another shyly, with unfamiliar ceremoniousness, and then, after listening awhile to the music and exchanging a few awkward phrases, wander away as if by common consent—­further away from this crowd and garish brilliance, far away, into some fragrant cell, where the light was dim.

“What do you make of it?” asked Keith of Madame Steynlin, who was listening intently.  “Is this music?  If so, I begin to understand its laws.  They are physical.  I seem to feel the effect of it in the lower part of my chest.  Perhaps that is the region which musical people call their ear.  Tell me, Madame Steynlin, what is music?”

“That’s a puzzle,” said the bishop, greatly interested.

“How can I explain it to you?  It is so complicated, and you have so many guests this evening.  You are coming to my picnic after the festival of Saint Eulalia?  Yes?  Well, I will try to explain it then”—­and her eye turned, with a kind of maternal solicitude, down the pathway to where, in that patch of bright moonshine, her young friend Krasnojabkin, gloriously indifferent to gipsies and everything else, was astounding people by the audacity of his terpsichorean antics.

“Let that be a promise,” Keith replied.  “Ah, Count Caloveglia!  How good of you to come.  I would not have asked you to such a worldly function had I not thought that this dancing might interest you.”

“It does, it does!” said the old aristocrat, thoughtfully sipping champagne out of an enormous goblet which he carried in his hand.  “It makes me dream of that East which it has never been my fortune, alas, to behold.  What a flawless group!  There is something archaic, Oriental, in their attitudes; they seem to be fraught with all the mystery, the sadness, of life that is past—­of things remote from ourselves.”

“My gipsies,” said Keith, “are not everybody’s gipsies.”

“I think they despise us!  And this austere regularity in the steps of the dancers, this vibrating accompaniment that dwells persistently on one note—­how primitive, how scornfully unintellectual!  It is like a passionate lover knocking to gain an entrance into our hearts.  And he succeeds.  He breaks down the barrier by the oldest and best of lovers’ expedients—­sheer reiteration of monotony.  A lover who reasons is no lover.”

“How true that is,” remarked Madame Steynlin.