[Pagingmon-announce] life with too little re

[Mervis <ing...@tx...>]

And never gave any concerts. And almost since the arrival of the
Marshalls in La Chance and his unceremonious entrance into the house as,
walking across the fields on a Sunday afternoon, he had heard Professor
Marshall playing the Doric Toccata on the newly installed piano, he had
spent his every Sunday evening in their big living-room. He had seen the
children appear and grow older, and adored them with Teutonic
sentimentality, especially Sylvia, whom he called his "Moonbeam
brincess," his "little ellfen fairy," and whom, when she was still tiny,
he used to take up on his greasy old knees and, resting his violin on
her head, play his wildest fantasies, that she might feel how it "talked
to her bones." In early childhood Sylvia was so used to him that, like
the others of her circle, she accepted, indeed hardly noticed, his
somewhat startling eccentricities, his dirty linen, his face and hands
to match, his shapeless garments hanging loosely over the flabby
corpulence of his uncomely old body, his beery breath. To her, old
Reinhardt was but the queer external symbol of a never-failing
enchantment. Through the pleasant harmonious give-and-take of the other
instruments, the voice of his violin vibrated with the throbbing passion
of a living thing. His dirty old hand might shake and quaver, but once
the neck of the fiddle rested between