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She rose and ran round the table to his side; and at the close sight of her, excited and yet muted with pity, brilliant as sunset but soft as light rain, the honest thing in him forgot the spurious scene he was carpentering. He exclaimed solemnly, "Nelly, you are very beautiful." She was startled. "Me, beautiful?" "Aye," he said, "beautiful." For a moment she pondered over it almost stupidly.
The buzzer which he had expected to roar in his ears was only a faint drone, and above it he could easily hear other sounds. Yet it was there, and he tested it by a series of loops away from the flyer. Each time as he came on the true beam he was rewarded by a deepening of the muted note. Yes, he could be a homer with that, and at the same time be alert to any other noise in his vicinity.
We were going rather a desultory drive through those less frequented parts of the city which I have mentioned as like a sort of muted Naples: poor folk living much out-of-doors, buying and selling at hucksters' stands and booths, and swarming about the chief market, where the guilty were formerly put to death, but the innocent are now provisioned.
"The muted felicity I have witnessed about my arrival is explained, then," I ventured, "Excitement that the end is near and victory close at hand, yet that feeling subdued by the realization that a period of deeper darkness must first be gone through."
A half-uprooted pine-tree stem propped mid-fall by standing comrades, and the downy drop to ground and muted scurry up the bark of long-brush squirrels, cocktail on the wary watch, were noticed by him as well as by her; even the rotting timber drift, bark and cones on the yellow pine needles, and the tortuous dwarf chestnut pushing level out, with a strain of the head up, from a crevice of mossed rock, among ivy and ferns; he saw what his girl saw.
He entered the drawing-room, and in the depths of the library, relieved against the rows of books in their glass cases, he startled Miss Shirley from a pose which she seemed to be taking there alone. At the instant of their mutual recognition she gave a little muted shriek, and then gasped out, "I beg your pardon," while he was saying, too, "I beg your pardon."
Both men toppled to the ground, now, and before they realized it Shirley had reversed the advantage. His automatic emphasized his superiority of tactics. He understood their silence, broken only by muted groans: they feared the police, even as did he, although for different reasons.
Vaudeville performers are by no means rare who can imitate the tones of the oboe, the clarinet, the muted trumpet, and several other instruments. Imitation of the notes and songs of birds is also a familiar type of performance. This peculiar gift of imitation results in each case from some special structure of the vocal organs.
They had gotten off one bus to wait along the road for another which, he assumed, would take them to other hamlets or rural scatterings possibly more remote than this assumed, for what did he know waiting perennially, or seemingly so as he was, and shaking his head from time to time to keep himself on top of the internal waves and not be overtaken, not be absorbed by them- waves which came upon him voraciously like inundating tongues, polysemous tsunamis of a muted, mutating language cryptic to him, not of volition and thus adventitious in a sense, but still of his own making.
Some talk, frankly audible, and others are frankly silent, but a deep, wide purr, tacit or explicit, close upon a muted hymn of thanksgiving, in that assemblage of mutually repellent personalities, for the nonce united, would best denote the universal content.
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