"Oh!--listen!" Paula cried, with sparkling eyes. "We have a new prophet. Hear Mr. Graham. He's worthy of your steel, of both your steel. He agrees with you that music is the refuge from blood and iron and the pounding of the table. That weak souls, and sensitive souls, and high-pitched souls flee from the crassness and the rawness of the world to the drug-dreams of the over-world of rhythm and vibration--"
"Atavistic!" Aaron Hancock snorted. "The cave-men, the monkey-folk, and the ancestral bog-men of Terrence did that sort of thing--"
"But wait," Paula urged. "It's his conclusions and methods and processes. Also, there he disagrees with you, Aaron, fundamentally. He quoted Pater's 'that all art aspires toward music'--"
"Pure prehuman and micro-organic chemistry," Aaron broke in. "The reactions of cell-elements to the doggerel punch of the wave-lengths of sunlight, the foundation of all folk-songs and rag-times. Terrence completes his circle right there and stultifies all his windiness. Now listen to me, and I will present--"
"But wait," Paula pleaded. "Mr. Graham argues that English puritanism barred music, real music, for centuries...."
"True," said Terrence.
"And that England had to win to its sensuous delight in rhythm through Milton and Shelley--"
"Who was a metaphysician." Aaron broke in.
"A lyrical metaphysician," Terrence defined instantly. "That you must acknowledge, Aaron."
"And Swinburne?" Aaron demanded, with a significance that tokened former arguments.
"He says Offenbach was the fore-runner of Arthur Sullivan," Paula cried challengingly. "And that Auber was before Offenbach. And as for Wagner, ask him, just ask him--"
And she slipped away, leaving Graham to his fate. He watched her, watched the perfect knee-lift of her draperies as she crossed to Mrs. Mason and set about arranging bridge quartets, while dimly he could hear Terrence beginning: "It is agreed that music was the basis of inspiration of all the arts of the Greeks...."
Later, when the two sages were obliviously engrossed in a heated battle as to whether Berlioz or Beethoven had exposited in their compositions the deeper intellect, Graham managed his escape. Clearly, his goal was to find his hostess again. But she had joined two of the girls in the whispering, giggling seclusiveness of one of the big chairs, and, most of the company being deep in bridge, Graham found himself drifted into a group composed of Dick Forrest, Mr. Wombold, Dar Hyal, and the correspondent of the Breeders' Gazette.