it any consolation for you to know that Van Kuyp will be famous?  What is his fame or his failure to you?  Where do you, Alixe Van Kuyp, come in?  Why must your charming woman’s soul be sacrificed, warped to this stunted tree of another’s talent?  You are silent.  You say he is trying to make me deny Richard!  You were never more mistaken.  I am interested in you both; interested in you as a noble woman—­stop!  I mean it.  And interested in Richard—­well—­because he is my own creation....”

She watched him now with her heart in her eyes; he frightened her more with these low, purring words, than if he declared open love.

“He is my own handiwork.  I have created him.  I have fashioned his outlines, have wound up the mechanism that moves him to compose.  Did you ever read that terrifying thought of Yeats, the Irish poet?  I’ve forgotten the story, but remember the idea:  ’The beautiful arts were sent into the world to overthrow nations, and, finally, life itself, sowing everywhere unlimited desires, like torches thrown into a burning city.’  There—­’like torches thrown into a burning city!’ Richard Van Kuyp is one of my burning torches.  In the spectacle of his impuissance I find relief from my own suffering.”

The booming of the Tzigane band was no longer heard—­only the horses’ muffled footfalls and the intermittent chromatic drone of hidden distant tram-cars.  She shivered and shaded her face with her fan.  There was something remote from humanity in his speech.  He continued with increasing vivacity:—­

“Music is a burning torch.  And music, like ideas, can slay the brain.  Wagner borrowed his harmonic fire from the torch of Chopin—­” She broke in:—­

“Don’t talk of Chopin!  Tell me more of Van Kuyp.  Why do you call him yours?” Her curiosity was become pain.  It mastered her prudence.

“In far-away Celtic legends there may be found a lovely belief that our thoughts are independent realities, that they go about in the void seeking creatures to control.  They are as bodiless souls.  When they descend into a human being they possess his moods, in very existence—­”

“And Richard!” she muttered.  His words swayed her like strange music; the country through which they were passing was a blank; she could see but two luminous points—­the nocturnal eyes of Elvard Rentgen, as he spun his cobwebs in the moonshine.  She did not fear him; nothing could frighten her now.  One desire held her.  If it were unslaked, she felt she would collapse.  It was to know the truth, to be told everything!  He put restraining fingers on her ungloved hand; they seemed like cold, fat spiders.  Yet she was only curious, with a curiosity that murdered the spirit within her.