board, and the papers being unwound from the violin, one by one, and the violin's case, dressed in black leather, appearing at the bottom of the crate like a living creature asleep. I imagined then that in its taut strings and in the suppleness of its yielding bow dwelt all the songs of the world.

I took the violin in my trembling hands and fondled it a long while; then I carried it and went flying about the passages of the house and its halls; I was a flame of gaiety and joy, whirling with it as though in a mad dance! In the dining room I was seized with dizziness and collapsed into the net hammock slung there, and I saw my mother and my sister spinning, and likewise the painted angels on the walls, carrying their woven garlands of flowers. It seemed to me that no beauty equaled the beauty of our house, that I did not live in that old house in the interior, but in a world adorned with lovely, harmonious colors! It seemed to me that my sister Livia had the beauty of the dwellers on Olympus, that my sister Eleonor was a maiden out of dreams, and that my mother was the very mine of goodness.

And my father? Who had given me the violin? He was a demigod!

*

And the lessons began. And since I was extreme in all things, I threw myself body and soul into the art, which I began to learn with astonishing ease, and I became — heeding nothing else — like a dweller on the moon.

One day my father called me into the study and shut the door on us. He said:

— A complaint reached me today from the mathematics teacher. If

you fail and stay down in your class, the violin lessons end.

In those days my father spoke with a terrifying brevity.

Terror seized me! Could this monstrous thing happen? Give up my music lessons because an ugly old teacher saw fit to "fail" me in the examination? And where should I find the time to study? And how should I study? And how should I leave the world of fancy and dreams to drown in the world of numbers, the world of goblins? After those enchanted melodies, could I bear to do sums like a little clerk in a shop?

Ah, how heavy is life's injustice upon a girl thirsty for fancy!

When I left Dona Mirtes's house that day I did not walk the usual road, but went wandering aimlessly through streets and alleys. Hugging my violin to my breast, I was like the mother of a little girl shielding her darling from evil men. I walked with a tragedy in my heart that made a martyr of me. I pictured myself with the violin torn from me, lifting my arms in supplication to a tyrant father. And I almost wished it might be taken from me, so that I might struggle for its sake as a lovesick girl suffers for her beloved! And I began to recall the many creatures who had struggled for the sake of art, and I saw myself starving in a dark hovel and walking barefoot upon the snow.

*

What a strange girl I was, living in dreams and not content with the life that made my two sisters happy — the life of quiet evenings by lamplight, when the music of the phonograph records played, and the hammock swayed, going and coming, and the shadows lengthened on the walls, and my father sat talking with our neighbor at one end of the table while the knot of women gathered at the other. How peace reigned at the hour coffee was

taken! And those sweets from the hands of our cook Umbelina, those sweets perfumed with aniseed — never in my life shall I taste their like!

And yet, for all that, there was that period of my life without savor! My God! Why was this discontent born in me to poison my life? And why do I remain so, knowing the worth of things only after they have gone from my hands?

Those hours, the hours of my first girlhood — would that they might return! Would that I might go back to the big blue house near the garden ringed with the silvered railing! Would that I might return once more and take flesh as a girl roaming the streets of the town of Casa Branca — that is, "the White House" — carrying in her arms a violin and carrying in her breast rebellion! Rebellion against lessons, against the family, against the powers that steer this world and make it hateful to a girl who lives in the world of dreams.

*

... Have we grown-ups ever withdrawn into ourselves and asked how far the cinema affects our children's lives? Have we reviewed the stirring impressions bred by the pictures of the actresses' wantonness, and their jewels, and their extravagance, and... their motorcars? And the tales of infatuation?? And some films — from first to last — are nothing but storms of scenes of exciting love?...

*

I suppose that day I walked a long while, and evening was drawing near when I arrived close to that house...

I stopped, tired, and leaned my violin against the railing; and the roses peered out as if spying on me, and stirred, swayed by the breeze, from side to side, and I felt a festival of flowers entering through my eyes into the depths