“Why, weren’t you one of the first violins at the Savoy fifteen years back?” asked Siegmund. They chatted awhile about music. They had known each other, had been fairly intimate, and had since become strangers. Hampson excused himself for having addressed Siegmund:
“I saw you with your nose flattened against the window,” he said, “and as I had mine in the same position too, I thought we were fit to be re-acquainted.”
Seigmund looked at the man in astonishment.
“I only mean you were staring rather hard at nothing. It’s a pity to try and stare out of a beautiful blue day like this, don’t you think?”
“Stare beyond it, you mean?” asked Siegmund.
“Exactly!” replied the other, with a laugh of intelligence. “I call a day like this ‘the blue room.’ It’s the least draughty apartment in all the confoundedly draughty House of Life.”
Siegmund look at him very intently. This Hampson seemed to express something in his own soul.
“I mean,” the man explained, “that after all, the great mass of life that washes unidentified, and that we call death, creeps through the blue envelope of the day, and through our white tissue, and we can’t stop it, once we’ve begun to leak.”
“What do you mean by ‘leak?’ ” asked Siegmund.
“Goodness knows—I talk through my hat. But once you’ve got a bit tired of the house, you glue your nose to the window pane, and stare for the dark—as you were doing.”
“But, to use your metaphor, I’m not tired of the House—if you mean Life,” said Siegmund.
“Praise God! I’ve met a poet who’s not afraid of
