Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/80

 taught as Marise thought all the teachers in France taught, the hardest possible way; scales, scales, scales and then thumping, monotonous exercises, played over forty, fifty, sixty times, till Marise felt as though there wasn't anything left of her except that exercise, pound, pound, pound all over her. Marise saw nothing in music except hatefully numerous little black dots on white paper, and heard nothing in it beyond a combination of sounds as interesting to hear as a problem in arithmetic is to look at.

She rather liked Mlle. Hasparren, although Maman thought she didn't have a bit of style; but she certainly did hate the three-times-a-week music lesson. She never could have kept on with it in America, but here everything was hard work, and if you weren't working at your music lesson, they'd expect you to be working at something else. And then, too, there was what Father had said about keeping at what you were doing until you got it just right. Marise's bed-room seemed to have taken up the sound of Father's voice as he said that, so that many times, as she sat there doing her lessons and not thinking of it, all of a sudden, the very curtains and walls and chairs seemed to be reminding her of it. That was really what kept her going, as day by day she sat down heavily before the piano, prodding her mind up to keep it fixed on the little black dots.

That at least was what had kept her at it till the evening which came back to Marise so clearly. Father and Maman had gone out to dinner; she had eaten alone, with Jeanne's chatter for company, and then on her way back to her room, had wandered into the salon, candlestick in hand, sort of hoping she could think of something nice to do before she settled down to study.

But there was certainly nothing nice to do in the salon. It was awfully lonely in there, the chairs all empty and stiff, standing around heavily, the thick curtains drawn close over the tall windows, and in front of the alcove where Maman's writing-desk stood, the polished floor shining hard and bright, the stands, the table with one of Maman's yellow-covered books on it, the dark little cave of a fireplace. Marise set her candle