It sometimes happens to me—­I suppose it happens to every one—­to hear some well-meaning person play or sing at a party.  Last night, at the Simpsons’, a worthy young man, who was staying there, sang some Schubert songs in a perfectly correct, weak, inexpressive voice, accompanying himself in a wooden and inanimate fashion—­the whole thing might have been turned out by a machine.  I was, I suppose, in a fretful mood.  “Good God!” I thought to myself, “what is the meaning of this woeful performance?—­a party of absurd dressed-up people, who have eaten and drunk too much, sitting in a circle in this hot room listening gravely to this lugubrious performance!  And this is the best that Schubert can do!  This is the real Schubert!  Here have I been all my life pouring pints of subjective emotion into this dreary writer of songs, believing that I was stirred and moved, when it was my own hopes and aspirations all along, which I was stuffing into this conventional vehicle, just as an ecclesiastical person puts his emotion into the grotesque repetitions of a liturgy.”  I thought to myself that I had made a discovery, and that all was vanity.  Well, we thanked the singer gravely enough, and went on, smiling and grimacing, to talk local gossip.  A few minutes later, a young girl, very shy and painfully ingenuous, was hauled protesting to the piano.  I could see her hands tremble as she arranged her music, and the first chords she struck were halting and timid.  Then she began to sing—­ it was some simple old-fashioned song—­what had happened? the world was somehow different; she had one of those low thrilling voices, charged with utterly inexplicable emotion, haunted with old mysterious echoes out of some region of dreams, so near and yet so far away.  I do not think that the girl had any great intensity of mind, or even of soul, neither was she a great performer; but there was some strange and beautiful quality about the voice, that now rose clear and sustained, while the accompaniment charged and tinged the pure notes with glad or mournful visions, like wine poured into water; now the voice fell and lingered, like a clear stream among rocks, pathetic, appealing, stirring a deep hunger of the spirit, and at the same time hinting at a hope, at a secret almost within one’s grasp.  How can one find words to express a thing so magical, so inexpressible?  But it left me feeling as though to sing thus was the one thing worth doing in the world, because it seemed to interpret, to reveal, to sustain, to console—­ it was as though one opened a door in a noisy, dusty street, and saw through it a deep and silent glen, with woodlands stooping to a glimmering stream, with a blue stretch of plain beyond, and an expanse of sunny seas on the rim of the sky.