Sacrifice | Page 3

little face--her eyes, skin, and fluffy hair all
harmonized in the most delicate shade of brown--resembled the face of
some European grande amoureuse seen through the small end of an
opera glass.
"Yes," said Miss Balbian at last to the charming, quiet ladies who sat in
her library drinking tea from old china cups. "Lilla is a strange, I may
say a startling, child." And allowing herself one of her rare public
failures of expression--a look of uneasiness--she added, half
swallowing her words, "I sometimes ask myself----"
CHAPTER III
Nearly every spring, Aunt Althea, craving "her beloved Europe," took
Lilla abroad.
Escorted by an elderly courier who had the appearance of a gentleman
in waiting at the Vatican, they moved with royal deliberation,
patronizing luxurious hotels, celebrated landscapes, notable art
collections. The governess was supplemented with the best local
teachers of music and languages; but it was Aunt Althea, with her
proud fastidiousness, her eclecticism at once virginal and ardent, who
set the keynote for Lilla's education.
All the young girl's inherited repugnances were enhanced. All her
sensibilities were aggravated. With the lapse of time and the expansion
of her world, her impassionable nature vibrated still more extravagantly,
at the most subtle stimuli, between the poles of happiness and
pain--which two sensations sometimes seemed to her identical.
Now she was lovelier than her mother had ever been--a tall, fragile,
pale brown creature whose carefully composed lips, whose deliberately
slow grace, only half concealed that inner intensity of hers.
She had, indeed, the exceptional, agitating look--that softly fatal

aspect---which is seen in those who are destined to extraordinary lives.
It was as though strange, unprecipitated events were clinging round her
slender body like an aura: the promises of unparalleled adventures in
love, perhaps also in tragedy. Before her twentieth year she had given
this presentiment to many men, who, with a thrill that may have been
partly fear, longed to be the cause of those raptures, and to accept the
perils.
In an alley of Constantine, in fierce sunshine that oppressed and
stimulated her delicate tissues, she stood before an old Arab who,
seated on the ground, told her fortune by strewing sand on a board.
"You will be loved by men," he said, after contemplating apathetically
the curlicues of sand. "And will be the death of men," he added, closing
his eyes as if bored; for out there, in the mountains beyond Constantine,
love and death, as partners in the fates of fair women, were
commonplace.
Before returning to America, Aunt Althea always managed a visit to
Rome. On her first day there, the spinster drove out alone, returning at
twilight with her eyelids swollen and red. She had been, she said, to the
English cemetery; but she declared that nobody whom she had known
was buried there.
They visited American ladies who had married into the Roman nobility.
In those historic palaces the great rooms were cool, dim, and resonant,
the women's voices died away in space between the tapestried walls
and the ceilings frescoed with pagan deities. Through the tall doorway
entered young men with medieval faces, in quest of a cup of tea.
To Lilla these descendants of medieval despots seemed curiously
dwarfed by their surroundings.
But her eyes were apt to turn wistful when she passed the shabby cafés
where famous artists had sat brooding over the masterpieces that she
admired. Then she thought of Bohemian studios at dusk, and of
geniuses aquiver, like dynamos, with the powers that had taken
possession of them. She envied the women whose lives were united to

theirs in an atmosphere where beauty was always being recreated, who
basked in that radiance of art which love, perhaps, had inspired.
Of all the arts it was music that cast over Lilla the strongest spell.
During the winter season in New York, she haunted concert halls where
celebrated musicians played their works. The new music, however,
strident with the echoes of industrialism, dissonant with the tumult of
great cities, repelled her. She turned instinctively toward the
harmonious romanticism and idealism of a previous age. She felt that
the compositions of Schumann and Schubert were the language that
had always been imprisoned in her heart, that could never reach her lips,
but that she now heard, by a miracle, freed and in its perfection.
When the concert was over, she could hardly prevent herself from
joining the women who surged toward the author of those sounds, as if
impelled by an inexorable force--or possibly by an idea that they must
mingle their lives with the life of the stranger who could so interpret
their souls, make clear to them their secrets, and give them, at least
momentarily, a coherent glimpse of their ideals.
One afternoon, in the exit of a concert hall, Lilla met Brantome,