in the pleasant state between waking and sleeping, while as yet the flavour of his favourite dishes still lingered in his mouth—just as the most blissful moments known to Uncle Percival were those in which he piped his cherished airs upon his antiquated instrument. The eldest member of the Wilde family was very old indeed—had in fact successfully rounded some years ago the critical point of his eightieth birthday, and there was the zest of a second childhood in the animation with which he had revived the single accomplishment of his early youth. That youth was now more vivid to his requickened memory than the present was to his enfeebled faculties. The past had become a veritable obsession in his mind, and when he fingered the old flute strength came back to his half-palsied hands and breath returned to his shrunken little body. His own music was the one sound he heard in all its distinctness, and he hung upon it with an enjoyment which was almost doting in its childish delight.
So the fluting went on merrily, while Mrs. Payne and Mrs. Bleeker, after fidgeting a moment in the drawing-room, decided that they would return for a word or two with Angela. "It is really the only place in the house where one can escape Percival's music," declared Mrs. Payne, who frankly confessed that she had reached the time of life when to bore her was the chief offence society could commit, "so, besides the comfort I afford dear Angela, it is much the pleasantest place for me to pass the evening. I've always been a merciful woman my child," she pursued shaking her little flat, false gray curls above her painted wrinkles, "for never in my life have I cast a stone at anyone who amused me; but as for Percival and his flute! Well, I won't say a disagreeable word on the subject, but I honestly think that a passion at his age is absolutely indecent."
She was so grotesquely gorgeous with her winking diamonds and her old point lace, which yawned over her lean neck, that the distinction she had always aimed at seemed achieved at last by an ironic exaggeration.
"At least it is a perfectly harmless passion," suggested her husband, a beautiful old man of seventy gracious years.
"Harmless!" gasped Mrs. Payne. "Why, it has wrecked the nerves of the entire family, has given me Saint Vitus' dance, has kept Laura awake for nights, has reduced Angela to hysterics, and you actually have the face to tell me it is harmless! Judged by its effects, I consider it quite as reprehensible as a taste for cards or a fancy for a chorus girl. Those are vices at least that belong to our century and to civilisation, but a flute is nothing less than a relic of barbarism."
"Well, it's worse on me than on anyone else," said Laura, with the dominant spirit which caused Mr. Payne to shiver whenever she tilted against his wife. "My room is just above, and I get the benefit of every note."
The tune issuing from the library had changed suddenly into "The Land o' the Leal," and by the lamp light Uncle Percival could be seen, warm and red and breathless but still blissfully fluting to the sleeping Mr. Bleeker, whose face, fallen back against the velvet cushions, wore a broad, beatific smile.
"He gets his happiness from it at least," persisted Laura. "I suppose it's a part of his life just as poetry is a part of mine, and to be happy at eighty-two one is obliged to be happy in an antedated fashion."
Then, as the two aunts swept from the room to join Angela, Laura seated herself at Mr. Payne's side and caught the hand which he outstretched. Of all the family he had been her favourite since childhood, and she sometimes told herself that he was the only one who knew her as she really was—who had ever penetrated behind her vivid outside armour of personality. He was a man of great unsatisfied tenderness, who indulged a secret charity as another man might have indulged a vicious taste. All his inclinations strained after goodness, and had he possessed the courage to follow the natural bent of his nature toward perfection he might have found his happiness in the peaceful paths of exalted virtue. But the constant dropping of cynicism will extinguish an angel, and, instead of becoming a shining light to his generation, he had dwindled into a glow-worm beneath the billows of his wife's velvet gown.
Now, as Laura held his hand, she bent upon him one of her long, meditative looks. "Uncle Horace, of all this queer family is Aunt Rosa the queerest or am I?"
Mr. Payne shook his silvered head. "I don't think you're a match for Rosa yet, my dear," he answered with his gentle humour. "Wait till you've turned seventy—then we'll see."
"But I'm not like other women. I don't think their ways. I don't even want the things they want."
The old man's smile shone out as he patted her hand. "That means, I suppose, that you don't want to be married. Who is it this time? Ah, my child, you are born to be adored or to be hated."
Without replying to his question, Laura lifted her full, dark eyes to his face. As he met the intellectual power of her glance, he told himself that he understood the mysterious active principle of her personality—how the many were repelled while the few returned to worship. One felt her, was repulsed or possessed by her, even in her muteness.
"I don't see how any one who has ever dreamed dreams," she said at last, "could fall in love and marry—it is so different—so different."
"So you have refused Mr. Wilberforce? Well, well, he has reached the age when a poor lover may make an excellent friend—and besides, to become Rosa's mouthpiece for a moment, he is very rich."
"And old enough to be my father—but it isn't that. Age has nothing to do with it, nor has congeniality—it is nothing in real life that comes between, for I am fond of him and I don't mind his white hairs in the least, but I can't give up my visions—my ideal hopes."
"Ah, Laura, Laura," sighed the old man, "the trouble is that you don't live on the earth at all, but in a little hanging garden of the imagination."
"And yet I want life," she said.
"We all want it, my child, until we've had it. At your age I wanted it, too, for I had my dreams, though I was not a poet. But there are precious few of us who are willing in youth to accept the world on its own terms—we want to add our little poem to the universal prose of things."
"But it is life itself that I want," repeated Laura.
"And so I wanted Rosa, my dear, every bit as much."
"Rosa!" There was a glow of surprise in the look she turned upon him.
"You find it hard to believe, but it is true nevertheless. I had my golden dream like everyone else, and when Rosa loved me I told myself it had all come true. Well, perhaps, in a measure it has, only, after all, Rosa turned out to be more suited to real life than to poetic moonshine."
"I can't imagine even you idealizing Aunt Rosa," said Laura, "but that I suppose is the way life equalises things."
"That way or another, and the worst it can do for us is to return us our own dreams in grotesque and mutilated forms. That will most likely be your portion, too, my child, for life has hurt every poet since the world began, and it will hurt you more than most because you are so big a creature."
Laura stirred suddenly and, after gazing a moment at the fire, turned upon him a face which had grown brilliant with animation. "I want to taste everything," she said. "I want to turn every page one after one."
"And yet you live the life of a hermit thrush—you have in reality as little part in that bustling turmoil of New York out there as has poor Angela herself."
"But my adventures will come to me—I feel that they will come."
"Then you're happy, my dear, for you have the best of your adventures as you call them in your waiting time."
She
