We were quite silent. She relieved the tension by stepping casually away
from the table and glancing past me into my room.
“Is that your phonograph--in there?” she asked, her voice still low, and
now a thought husky.
“Yes,” said I. “You must have heard it.”
She nodded slowly. “Sometimes it sounded like that,” she mused. “And
other times it was like music a long way off. You played some melodies
on a Chinese stringed instrument. They were quaint.”
“It is a Japanese instrument,” I corrected eagerly. Then I became
confused, and knew that I was turning red again. The story of those
Yoshiwara melodies and of the outcast girl who had played them for me
seemed painfully out of place here. Not for anything in the world would
I have told that commonplace story--not to this slim woman with the sad,
honest blue eyes. For we do not tell such stories to women.
“You spoke of the piano scale,” she went on, in that musing tone. “I
never knew before that other people noticed that. Sometimes, when I'm
sitting at the piano, and strike one of the black keys after playing on
the white, I can hear all around if--overtones, and fractions of tones.”
“Tell me,” I said--“What is the closest interval you have ever sung?”
She slowly shook her head. “I don't know. There never was any reason for
trying. And then there was no way to measure fractional tones.”
“There is now,” said I, emphatically. “My ear. Try it. We shall find
out. First give me upper _c_.”