head? Here he was twenty-two, and intacto, and it wasn't as though he wouldn't enjoy sowing wild oats, for he most certainly would. It was discouraging to be so chaste; artistically speaking, it was immoral.
From Scriabin he drifted backward to Debussy, which was like sailing into a calm cove after making headway against choppy seas. The Debussy prelude, an old favorite, had long since ceased to be exciting: it was pleasantly narcotic, and his mind was drowsing off when a faint warm whiff of an unknown flower came in through the open window.
In his eagerness to capture it he found himself involuntarily subduing the volume of tone, pressing down the soft pedal, and this struck him as being such a strange thing, psychologically, to be doing that he was oblivious for the moment to the fact that there wasn't a flower within a stone's throw of his windows—except for pink daisies, which were odorless. . . .
The music had restored his spirits and co-ordinated his nerves. He felt even equal to an attack upon Chopin etudes which had always been his despair, and launched into a sea of mutinous chords.
"Don't you ever play anything a fellow can whistle?"
He looked up to see Eric Peperell, smooth, pink, tan, and gold, provokingly healthy, dressed with careful carelessness. With a self-conscious lurch Eric straddled a chair, his arms resting on the back, a newly bound golf club dangling to the floor. When you shoot up to six foot two without warning, Grover
