"What are you concocting between you?"

"Nothing at all. We've fallen out--we don't agree."

"Is he a publisher?"

"He's an editor."

"Well, I'm glad you don't agree. I don't know what he wants, but,
whatever it is, don't do it."

"He must do what _I_ want!" said Baron.

"And what's that?"

"Oh, I'll tell you when he has done it!" Baron begged her to let him
hear the "musical idea" she had mentioned in her letter; on which she
took off her hat and jacket and, seating herself at her piano, gave
him, with a sentiment of which the very first notes thrilled him, the
accompaniment of his song. She phrased the words with her sketchy
sweetness, and he sat there as if he had been held in a velvet vise,
throbbing with the emotion, irrecoverable ever after in its
freshness, of the young artist in the presence for the first time of
"production"--the proofs of his book, the hanging of his picture, the
rehearsal of his play. When she had finished he asked again for the
same delight, and then for more music and for more; it did him such a
world of good, kept him quiet and safe, smoothed out the creases of
his spirit. She dropped her own experiments and gave him immortal
things, and he lounged there, pacified and charmed, feeling the mean