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.

I must have shown by my face how shocked I was at this revelation, for Hopestill hastened on to assure me that her cousin was not a Lesbian, was probably not even conscious that she preferred women to men. (It had not, of course, occurred to me that she might be perverted in this way. What alarmed me was the thought that she might prove similar to my mother.) She did not fear them, but she recoiled from them in a frigid, old-maidish way, and unlike Miss Pride who could join the gentlemen almost as a gentleman herself, she was ill at ease in their company, embarrassed, often rude, because her vanity warned her that they would make love to her. The third gift of her fairy godmother (the first two being talent and self-esteem) was a stern, intuitive moral nature which kept her so under control that none but the most astute observer suspected anything irregular about her, but which allowed her to surround herself with girls, to caress them chastely, to send them presents, and to write them affectionate letters, indulgences permissible since they could have no consequences. I asked how her second husband had figured in this intricate pattern.

“Oh, poor Cousin Ralph was baffled by her, but he was grateful because she was so sweet to Amy. Aside from that, the marriage was a dud. She treated him like a butler—always called him ‘Brooks’—and wouldn’t speak to him before four in the afternoon when she was certain of having callers.”

“Do you think she’s taken me up because she’s certain I’ll never know the first thing about music?”