I could not resist the temptation to advance myself with the Countess. “Balzac is sublime,” I said. “He has touched all passions and given the commonplace the stature of tragedy. I cannot feel that Shakespeare is any greater.” I was quoting from George Moore, a passage which had at first captivated Nathan with its audacity and then had filled him with derision. Since I had read very little of Balzac and worshipped Shakespeare with the fine rapture of adolescence, I visualized inverted commas about my words, but my voice did not convey them to the Countess who cried, “Lucy said you were clever, but she didn’t prepare me for this! What an addition to Boston you are!”

My voice shook with shame as I replied, “Oh, I have only a few tags.”

“By the way, I don’t understand your name, Sonie. Is it short for Euphrosyne?” Through a misreading of the word, she had metathesized the vowels and pronounced it “Euphrysone.” I explained that Sonie was my own childish corruption of Sonia. “What a pity,” she said. “Not that I don’t love Sonia for you, but it would have been so delightful if you had been named for the goddess of Mirth. Your eyes are so merry.” She held me off at arm’s length. With a supreme effort I obliged her by grinning, hoping to infect my eyes with the merriness I put into my lips. “There! Isn’t it the image of Euphrysone!”

A woman and her daughter came up to us at that moment to say good-by. “Amelia and I have so enjoyed the afternoon, Berthe. I love your nest and your cunning little harpsichord. You’re like a sirocco to warm our cold New England.”

The Countess glowed. “You’re a fibber,” she said, rising and taking both hands of her guest. “But you must come and tell me the same sweet-sounding fibs every Friday you possibly can. Next week I’m going to play the Haydn Opus 21 in D Major.”

“I don’t believe I know it,” said the woman who did not, in that sense, know any music. “But if you will let us, we will come, won’t we, Amelia? Amelia is wild about music, aren’t you, Amelia?”

Amelia, fourteen years old, a gawky girl with long legs and knobby knees who was, obviously, at this stage of her life, an enemy to music and to mankind, nodded in agreement and said in a high, rushing voice as if she had got it by heart, “Yes, I am, Countess von Happel. I don’t know anything about it, but I know what I like.”

The Countess took them to the door, kissed them and proclaimed her love to the furiously blushing and twitching Amelia. She returned and settled down beside me again to resume her inquisition. But at that moment, she perceived that Garvin was edging toward the door, leaving Gerhardt Preis still standing by the refreshment table. “Well,” she said resolutely, “I may as well do it now, make it quite clear he can’t come again. Lou,” she called to a girl who was reading the titles in the collection of record-albums and turned at the sound of her name, “will you come meet Miss Sonia Marburg?”