I. Augustus to Lady Maude

Wight, 2 June

My dear Maude, You may be sure that I did not intend to write to you so soon after your departure for Lake Garda. Yet I need your advice and counsel in a matter of great delicacy. Indeed, I do not exaggerate when I tell you that it is a choice upon which depends all my future happiness. If a man may not consult his nearest and dearest female cousin on such occasions, where is he to look for assistance? I am tempted to believe that my life was changed utterly last night, soon after nine o'clock. Dr. Raspail would tell you, of course, that such mental impulses on my behalf go only to prove my condition of neurasthenia. I cannot help these opinions on the part of others. Let me tell you first of the event and then beg your assistance. I went last night to the recital rooms to hear Poland's greatest son-the mane of splendid hair and the fingers so white and thin-perform a double prodigy. We were to burn in the romantic grandeur of Brahms's “Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel,” having first had our spirits soothed by the elegaic cadences of my beloved Robert Schumann's “Etudes Symphoniques.” There is something so intimate and sensual about a recital of this sort on a warm summer evening. One sits among red plush and gilding, the Steinway polished to a liquid gloss of honey, the keys smooth to touch and sounding with such cool precision. One's gaze caresses the bare neck and frail shoulder blades of a fine young woman in a low-cut dress. The bone so slender and the skin so sleek with humid air. There one observes a girl of sixteen, sitting meek and demure as a nun in the spell of the music, the sweep of her nut-brown hair like the veil of a novice framing a face of pale oval beauty, her loveliness lit by the steady gaze of hazel eyes.

Yet there is nothing more sensuous than the fine piano itself, its scents of velvet and wood, the fragrance of its polish, the pure white felt of its hammers.