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‘The pleasure is mine, gracious lady,’ he murmured in German.

‘Ach, so you are a German,’ she replied in the same tongue. ‘I thought no American or Englishman could have so much divine fire. You see, mein Herr, I do not even know your name–only your genius. Every afternoon I have lain here, lapped in your music, but I might never have had the courage to thank you had you not played that marvellous thing just now–such delicious heartbreak, such adorable gaiety, and now and then the thunder of the gods! I’m afraid you’ll think me very ignorant–it wasn’t Grieg, was it?’

He looked uncomfortable. ‘Nothing so good, I fear–a mere impromptu of my own.’

‘Your own!’ She clapped her jewelled hands in girlish delight. ‘Oh, where can I get it?’

‘East Side,’ some mocking demon tried to reply; but he crushed her down, and replied uneasily: ‘You can’t get it. It just came to me this afternoon. It came–and it has gone.’

‘What a pity!’ But she was visibly impressed by this fecundity and riotous extravagance of genius. ‘I do hope you will try to remember it.’

‘Impossible–it was just a mood.’

‘And to think of all the other moods I seem to have missed! Why have I not heard you in America?’

He grew red. ‘I–I haven’t been playing there,’ he murmured. ‘You see, I’m not much known outside a few European circles.’ Then, summoning up all his courage, he threw down his name ‘Rozenoffski’ like a bomb, and the red of his cheeks changed to the pallor of apprehension. But no explosion followed, save of enthusiasm. Evidently, the episode so lurid to his own memory, had left no impress on hers.

‘Oh, but America must know you, Herr Rozenoffski. You must promise me to come back in the fall, give me the glory of launching you.’ And, seeing the cloud on his face, she cried: ‘You must, you must, you must!’ clapping her hands at each ‘must.’

He hesitated, distracted between rapture and anxiety lest she should remember.

‘You have never heard of me, of course,’ she persisted humbly; ‘but positively everybody has played at my house in Chicago.’

‘Ach so!‘ he muttered. Had he perhaps misinterpreted and magnified the attitude of these Americans? Was it possible that Mrs. Wilhammer had really been too ill to see him? She looked frail and feverish behind all her brilliant beauty. Or had she not even seen his letter? had her secretary presumed to guard her from Semitic invaders? Or was she deliberately choosing to forget and forgive his Jewishness? In any case, best let sleeping dogs lie. He was being sought; it would be the silliest of social blunders to recall that he had already been rejected.

‘It is years since Chicago had a real musical sensation,’ pleaded the temptress.

‘I’m afraid my engagements will not permit me to return this autumn,’ he replied tactfully.

‘Do you take sugar?’ she retorted unexpectedly; then, as she handed him his cup, she smiled archly into his eyes. ‘You can’t shake me off, you know; I shall follow you about Europe–to all your concerts.’

When he left her–after inscribing his autograph, his permanent Munich address, and the earliest possible date for his Chicago concert, in a dainty diary brought in by her red-haired maid–his whole being was swelling, expanding. He had burst the coils of this narrow tribalism that had suddenly retwined itself round him; he had got back again from the fusty conventicles and the sunless Ghettos–back to spacious salons and radiant hostesses and the great free life of art. He drew deep breaths of sea-air as he paced the deck, strewn so thickly with pleasant passengers to whom he felt drawn in a renewed sense of the human brotherhood. Rishus, forsooth!