“Would you not do the same for me?  I imagine, between ourselves, that the judge has been a good deal flustered with this trial and the intervention of Don Giustino.  Perhaps he lost his head.  We are all liable to that, are we not?  He is a nervous man; but quite a good fellow if one keeps on the right side of him.  It is so easy to keep on the right side of people.  I often wonder, Madame Steynlin, why men are so full of bitterness towards each other.  It is one of the things I shall never live to understand.  And another is this problem of music!  Will you help me to grasp the pleasure which you seem to derive from it?  Helmholtz does not bring me much further.  He explains why certain sounds are necessarily disagreeable—­”

“Oh, Mr. Keith!  You would go to a professor.  I fear you are not very musical.  Have you never felt inclined to cry?”

“I have.  But not in a concert-room.”

“Nor yet in a theatre?”

“Never,” he replied, “though it saddens me a little to see grown-up men and women stalking about in funny dressing-gowns and pretending to be kings and queens.  When I watch Hamlet or Othello, I say to myself:  ’This stuff is nicely riveted together.  But, in the first place, the story is not true.  And secondly, it is no affair of mine.  Why cry about it?’”

“That looks as if you were heartless and unimaginative.  And you so compassionate!  I do not understand you.  I do not understand myself either.  We are always groping about in the dark, are we not?  We are always puzzling about our own problems instead of helping other people with theirs.  Perhaps one should not think so much of oneself, though it is an interesting subject.  Tell me, if music says nothing to you, why not leave it alone?”

“Because I want to be able to extract pleasure from it, as you do.  That is what makes me curious.  I like to understand things, because then I can begin to enjoy them.  I think knowledge should intensify our pleasures.  That is its aim and object, so far as I am concerned.  What are other joys—­those of the illiterate and incurious?  A dog scratching his fleas in the sunshine.  They too are not wholly to be despised—­”

“What a dreadful simile!”

“A precise one.”

“You like to be precise?”

“It is my mother’s fault.  She brought me up so carefully.”

“I think that is a pity, Mr. Keith.  If I had children I would let them run wild.  People are too tame nowadays.  That is why so few of them have any charm.  These poor Russians—­no one tries to understand them.  Why is everybody so much alike?  Because we never follow our feelings.  And yet, what is a surer guide than the heart?  We seem to live in a world of echoes.”

“A world of masks, Madame Steynlin.  It is the only theatre worth looking at. . . .”