invested with the title and pre

cedency of the younger issue of a Marquess.

He was then William IV, King of Great Britain and Ireland.

For a time her last resting place remained unmarked, then a flat stone appeared that was sacred to the memory of Dorothy Jordan. It tenderly described her manners, her wit, her charm, her benefactions and told the passer-by:

She Departed this Life
The 3rd of July, 1816
Aged Fifty

Remember and weep for her!

22

Many did remember and weep. Others remembered and smiled in their tears. Among them I am sure was the critical friend who once discovered her charm.

"I have it, madam!" he said. "It is your swindling laugh. You have caught the hearty enjoyment of unrestrained infancy, delighting in its own buoyancy; and you have preserved this in children of a larger growth who in the world are checked and blighted by decorum and art, authority and hypocrisy."

There were those in England who swore that she did not die in distant St.-Cloud as was reported. People who die strange deaths in out of the

way places have an annoying manner of returning to credulous ones, perhaps from the spirit world, after the recorded date of their taking off.

John Ort, Marshal Ney and the "Lost Dauphin" persisted in revisiting "the glimpses of the moon" after they had been decently buried. There are many others who refuse to lie quiet in their tombs.

Dora's perturbed spirit, or its corporeal case, must needs return to Britain. Her biographer, Boaden, declares that one day after the little woman had been reported dead and buried at St.-Cloud, she was met and spoken to by an intimate acquaintance on the street in London. A stoutish lady was gazing through a thick veil at some trinkets in a shop window. As she raised her lorgnette the observer recognized an inimitable gesture that could belong to none other than Dora Jordan. He waited, watching; she lifted the veil for a better view. Beyond question it was she. "Is not this Mrs. Jordan?" he inquired. The lady gave him a terrified look of recognition-was about to speak, then dropped her veil and hurried on. Others in her own family protested that they had met her. Who knows? London had been very dear to her. It is all strange and disturbing.

M

TOST of the audience had gone. With it Orchestra Hall was purged of the people who rustled their programs, the people who coughed, the people who opened and shut bags and vanity-cases with loud snaps, or looked around perpetually to identify acquaintances.

With these people vanished the impalpable but deadening blight of the presence of those who go to Symphony Concerts in order to go to Symphony Concerts, and not for the purpose of listening to the music.

The soloist-Gieseking-returned now for an encore. The house was hushed to absolute silence; and then that silence was lightly rippled by the most beautiful music in creation. It began with a low-voiced phrase of delicate and ethereal notes-farspaced, single notes. There are times when piano music is more intimate than any other music. This was such a time.

The composition which began in this low-voiced confidence on the golden shore of eternity flowed and surged in wider and wider reaches, shot with vivid iridescence. At one moment the pale surf of all the seas tossed and whirled over one's consciousness. At another moment a myriad-hued buoyancy of spacious

tides swept one away and away in the serenity of immortal mysterydown dreamless paths unguessed, beyond the senses' powersbeyond the breath of fragrance, sound and light

as once through crystal, unremembered hours

the mermaid dived who loved a mortal knight,

far forth-far forth

where South is not, or North— past all the compassed roads the reason tells

to unknown citadels.

We had heard a great composition interpreted by a genius. We had heard the free speech of music. On the next day the interpreter was praised, just as ten other pianists with none of his peculiar, individual powers have been praised—“brilliant technique," "piano pyrotechnics." This standardized praise served to conceal his singular distinction from the readers of "musical criticism" as completely as the standardized blame cast upon his performance by other suppressive listeners.

"Free speech" is one of the most poetic and suggestive phrases mankind has ever made. Yet some of its most ardent devotees in outward seeming, often like the sound of the

phrase better than the sense. I sometimes believe that the conception it represents will never prevail in the United States. For the greatest foe of free speech, the strongest enemy of liberated personal expression in this country is not "censorship" but our national inability to listen attentively to any one who has anything of his own to say.

American people—and "critics"will readily go to concerts; and will readily look at the pages of all kinds of books. But by an absorption in a stupid little racket of their own purposes, and the never-ending distraction of identifying former acquaintances, they will remain deaf, they will exclude from their consciousness, they will suppress all the peculiar revelation of truth and beauty the individual author of music, of prose, of poetry might have expressed to them, if they had only liked to listen to him!

Emerson acted as such a suppressive listener or a would-be suppressive listener-when he dismayed Howells by characterizing Poe as "the jingle-man." About two years ago I had the pleasure of reading a superb biography of the world's greatest sailor-Magellan. Every page as I thought showed the hand of a biographer endowed with a profound and phenomenal knowledge of

the splendor and the horror of the ocean. The immense range of hardships, the vastness, above all the overwhelming length and sweep of Magellan's immortal voyage were expressed by Arthur Hildebrand with unexcelled power and sympathy. A sailor's life of a sailor, this fascinating book was destined, in so far as I observed its fate in the whirlpool of American reviews, to encounter among its critics only suppressive listeners, reviewers who were too preoccupied with their acquaintance with other lives of Magellan, or with comment on the book's jacket, or with other irrelevant interests to hear the author's singular tale of truth, or notice his original design.

Then there was-but I will not multiply instances. They are without number. I prefer to suggest a new program, a new society of a humble, convenient character to be called the American Defenders of Free Speech. The society will require no dues-not even a dollar a year-no meetings, no signing of blanks, no election of officers. It will be composed of those who like to sit quietly listening to music, and of those who like to sit quietly reading books; and the members will have no aim in their listening and their reading but that of learning the author's peculiar truth and beauty.

SWALD ASHCRAFT got up from his chair, yawned, stretched himself and looked round the empty, sumptuous drawing-room. On the bombé commode, glistening as crystal and figured with delicate inlay, the French allegoric clock conversed discreetly. It was three o'clock. He lifted the long-cold coffee-pot, which he had told the footman to leave, but found it empty. There was nothing to do-positively. The House was not sitting; it was too late now to go down to the cityand in any case a waste of time, as the office ran itself, or was run, as well if not better when he was away.

On the table by the Coromandel screen were some paper-covered French novels. He crossed the room and idly turned them over. They were not worth opening, he expected. Millicent had no flair for choosing books and her friends always seemed to recommend dull ones; but in any case he was not in the mood for reading. He looked over the glassy, rug-strewn parquet to where the fire burned with thin yellow flames in its wrought-steel basket; then he turned to the windows. Outside the day was gray and the bare trees of Grosvenor Square stirred uneasily in the November breeze. A big gray touringcar sailed into view and was visible

through one after the other of the three lofty windows. If either of the girls had been at home he could have ordered Hamley and taken them for a drive-to Richmond Park or even to Box Hill-but Millicent had Angela with her and Nancy was not due back from her finishing-school for another week or so.

There was nothing to do-not till dressing-time. There would be twelve for dinner, he remembered, and he would have that tiresome Mrs. Dyson Muller on one side of him. Who the other woman was to be, he had forgotten.

He took his cigarette-case from his pocket but returned it unopened. He'd go to his club! That was what he would do. He might find some one there. Going downstairs he helped himself into his overcoat, took his hat and umbrella and let himself

out.

Clouded by a vague dissatisfaction he walked along Mount Street, across Berkeley Square and into Bond Street. The roadway was muddy, but the pavement was dry again and not crowded. His furled umbrella under his arm he walked briskly. Suddenly a patch of scarlet in the window of a picture shop caught his eye. He stopped and considered the painting: it was of two macaws

against a somber background, done with an eye for their decorative value in a room, and set in a carved and silvered eighteenth century frame. The thing was richly colored, effective. He rather liked it. It was exactly the sort of thing Hetty used to do. He stopped and scrutinized the picture. There in the corner of it, sure enough, was a monogram of initials-H. H. S.-slender and spidery like a pattern in spillikins. Hetty! It was months, years probably, since he had last thought of her. Hetty! So she was still at it-still turning out the same stuff.

had a dingy appearance. The fellows there had the best of it. They had the gracious and refined Adam's façade of his own club to look at, he thought with a malicious smile. To sit in a window and look out was about all there was to do on such a day. There was nothing else to do, the Lord knew!

His eyes traveled over the gray blue carpet and its endless yellow scrolls. That new committee had not changed that at any rate-not yet. He chuckled, drew a deep breath and sighed.

So Hetty was still painting parrots for a living, was she? How sick of them she must be. So she had never got away with her portraits, her real interest. No, he had never supposed she would. But to be still at those

"Nothing for you, Sir Oswald," the white haired porter told him with that thin smile which hid his life.

The smoking-room was empty. Oswald Ashcraft fingered the weekly papers out of their neat ranks, but did not take one up! He went to the fire and stood with his back to it, warmed his hands and surveyed the room. They had moved that writing-table again, he noticed. Until a month or so before, it had stood in exactly the same place for all the twenty-five years he had been a member, and no doubt ever since those Regency days when it had been made; but of late that tiresome new committee could leave nothing alone.

Through the bow-window he could see Brooks' across the way. In the gray and changing winter light it

Yes, she had been twenty-four then; she must be nearly forty-eight nowwould be forty-eight in the spring. Yes, in April. Her birthday was toward the end of it. He could remember once they had all celebrated it by taking a day off and going down to Rocheville Gardens in a penny steamboat. Battersea Park Pier to Gravesend. He remembered it as though it were yesterday. It had been just such a gray day as it was to-day. Smoky drifting clouds and a chill disconsolate wind; but they had been happy enough; it had been the greatest fun. They had had the steamer almost to themselves: Langley had taken his banjo and they had all sung-and they had eaten grocers' grapes. Hetty's blessed grocers' grapes.

23

A page-boy entered, rearranged the already tidy writing-table, re