Page:Henry B. Fuller - Bertram Cope's Year, 1919.djvu/188

 the obbligato (with no statement as to whether it was simple or not).

Carolyn approached the task and the piano in the passive spirit of accommodation. Cope came forward with reluctance: this was not an evening when he felt like singing; besides, he preferred to choose his own songs. Also, he would have preferred to warm up on something familiar. Amy took her instrument from its case with a suppressed sense of ecstasy; and it is the ecstatic who generally sets the pace.

The thing went none too well. Amy was the only one who had seen the music before, and she was the only one who particularly wanted to make music now. However, the immediate need was not that the song should go well, but that it should go: that it should go on, that it should go on and on, repetitiously, until it should come (or even not come) to go better. She slid her bow across the strings with tasteful passion. She enjoyed still more than her own tones the tones of Cope's voice,—tones which, whether in happy unison with hers or not, were, after all, seldom misplaced, whatever they may have lacked in heartiness and confidence. It was a short piece, and on the third time it went rather well.

"How perfectly lovely!" exclaimed Mrs. Phillips, at the right moment.

Cope smiled deprecatingly. "It might be made to go very nicely," he said.

"It has gone very nicely," insisted Amy; "it did, this last time." She waved her bow with some vivacity. She had heaved the whole of her young self into the