Walker-My_Musical_Ex.. - Walter Cosand

HENSELT 365
Touching lightly on what neither of us wished
that day, at least— ^to enter on more fully, we passed
on to subjects of general interest. She asked me
what I had been doing in music during those years,
and when I told her that I had come to Eussia to
study the Henselt method, she was amused and some-
what indignant—said it was absurd, ridiculous ; she
remembered how well I played, etc. I begged of her
just to wait a month, and I was certain she would be
of a very different opinion ; and meanwhile she begged
me to come and dine with her on a stated day every
week.
We had so much to relate to each other, that for
the first three times I went to her we did not seem to
need music, but on the fourth occasion I brought
Cramer and the Exercices preparatoires, and when I
sat down and showed her how I had been working,
the amused look which had come over her face when
I had first seated myself at the piano, was soon succeeded
by one of great surprise. She looked at me
most earnestly from time to time the rest of the
evening, and one or two days after came to me with
what she called ' a great request '—namely, that I
would drill her into what I had been learning with
Mademoiselle Heinrichsen. And then she told me
that in her early youth Henselt was a constant guest
at her father's dinner-table ; that as a girl of seven-
teen she had had ten lessons from him, that her
parents had arranged a marriage for her not long
—