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that her young daughter-in-law (full of respect for her new
and noble family, except in such matters as related to the
intellect, upon which, having ‘got as far’ as Harmony and
the Greek alphabet, she was specially enlightened) despised
Chopin, and fell quite ill when she heard him played. But
finding herself free from the scrutiny of this Wagnerian,
who was sitting, at some distance, in a group of her own
contemporaries, Mme. de Cambremer let herself drift upon
a stream of exquisite memories and sensations. The Prin-
cesse des Laumes was touched also. Though without any
natural gift for music, she had received, some fifteen years
earlier, the instruction which a music-mistress of the Fau-
bourg Saint-Germain, a woman of genius who had been,
towards the end of her life, reduced to penury, had start-
ed, at seventy, to give to the daughters and granddaughters
of her old pupils. This lady was now dead. But her meth-
od, an echo of her charming touch, came to life now and
then in the fingers of her pupils, even of those who had been
in other respects quite mediocre, had given up music, and
hardly ever opened a piano. And so Mme. des Laumes could
let her head sway to and fro, fully aware of the cause, with
a perfect appreciation of the manner in which the pianist
was rendering this Prelude, since she knew it by heart. The
closing notes of the phrase that he had begun sounded al-
ready on her lips. And she murmured ‘How charming it is!’
with a stress on the opening consonants of the adjective, a
token of her refinement by which she felt her lips so roman-
tically compressed, like the petals of a beautiful, budding
flower, that she instinctively brought her eyes into harmony,

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