The Countess was a “natural,” she said, having been blessed with a perfect ear and with perfect taste. But through an inertia, deeply hidden under nervous energy and physical tirelessness, she had never supplemented her native and very considerable gifts with any study, was and always had been totally ignorant of the science, the history, the criticism of music. And, although she had no intellect, she had the intelligence to realize that if she were to be happy in the kind of musical circles to membership in which she was entitled, she must learn to think about her art and how to talk about it. The task was too enormous and it did not occur to her guileless mind to bluff her way through, though she was not above setting herself up as an expert amongst people whom she knew to be worse informed than she. Thus, in Vienna, her peers and her admirers were never permitted to make her acquaintance. At the same time, because she had been born self-conceited, she craved to be spoiled by something more personal than the press and more objective than her husband the Count, her doting family, her aristocratic but inartistic friends. She was ambitious for a following of innocent people. Consequently, she had divorced the Count and married the New Englander (whose name, for obvious reasons, she did not take) and immediately on coming to America, instituted these little musical afternoons to which, as a rule, only young people (“preferably tone deaf,” said Hopestill spitefully) were invited. And now, if she were threatened by one of her guests who was disobeying the rules and learning something about music, she could take refuge in her difficulty with the English language. The audacious guest was shortly dropped.

I asked Hopestill if this, then, accounted for her treatment of Gerhardt Preis. “In a way, yes,” she replied. “But there’s more to it than that. That part of Berthe is more complicated.” She told me that the Countess had deliberately made the young man fall in love with her while he was teaching her the harpsichord, for, it was generally assumed, she far preferred his enraptured looks and his mash notes sent with the yellow roses he showered upon her to any formal discussions of the music she was studying, and because Preis spoke German she could not pretend not to understand him. Then, having extracted his usefulness from him and far outstripping him in her management of the instrument, she got rid of him. Here the second of her peculiarities entered in. Apparently it would have been simple enough to keep him on tenterhooks indefinitely, to make his lips always the vehicle of nothing more dangerous than professions of love. And it would have seemed that keeping him by her would be greatly to her advantage since everyone knew that his virtuosity promised him an eminent career. Why not, then, since his sting was removed, save him as an ornament for her salon? The fact was that she disliked men.