If ever there was a magic enchantment which put to sleep the court and castle, it was such clear and elegant music as this. So I thought to myself as a silence fell upon the beauty of women and the men in their formal dress and decorations. Then the spell was cast in the plaintive descending chords which are the prelude to the “Etudes Symphoniques.” I was so absorbed in thoughts of Schumann, the great romantic angel who died in the madhouse, his soul torn between the sublime inner music of paradise and the torment of the devil's fugues, that I could not have told you if there was a woman within a hundred yards of me. My eye came to rest on her the first time and I scarcely noticed anything about her.

She was eighteen, I suppose, and she had straight blond hair which was put up into a coquettish little bun on the top of her head. It was worn rather as a little girl might, giving an appearance which is both prim and yet somehow provoking. We were sitting at opposite ends of a crescent-shaped row of seats. It was not surprising, then, that my eye should rest upon her from time to time. Again the plaintive elegiac chords; their harmonies extended as suggestively as only the great Schumann could do. Without being at first aware of it, I was looking at her again. You will laugh at me, my dearest Maude. I know you will. And yet I beg you to try and understand. She was no ravishing beauty. I cannot tell you what it was in her race which drew my gaze back to her so often that, at last, I felt she and every other person in the recital room must have observed the oddity of my conduct. No, my beloved cousin, it was not the face of a great beauty. Does that matter? Petrarch, they say, only saw his earthly goddess Laura De Sade on a single occasion. And yet, the greatest of all love poets devoted the rest of his life to her praise.