“I will help you as far as I can. I will arrange your recital, get you a hall, have tickets, programmes and announcements printed, and secure you a tolerable press. All this I will do without in the least guaranteeing that your enterprise will be anything but a howling fiasco.” She had expected so little that she was grateful even for this. She had prepared herself to receive merciless rebuffs. What she had not prepared herself to do was to express gratitude. Consequently she found a difficulty in doing so. But no annoyance was discernible in him. He did not appear to want her thanks or even to notice the absence of them. And this in some inexplicable sense piqued her. She would have liked him to say: “Aren’t you grateful?” (Though, of course, it was just the last thing he would ever say.) But at least he might have waited enquiringly for her to voice her gratitude. And if he had, she would probably not have done so. But because he ran on talking of all kinds of irrelevant things she was both quaintly annoyed and intensely desirous of thanking him. Suddenly she realized he was paying her the stupendous compliment of talking to her about himself. “Of course I love music,” he was saying, “but I do not let it occupy my whole life. There are bigger things. Infinitely bigger things....” She was pleased he had used the word “love” so straightforwardly, so naturally, so unhysterically. She was glad he had not said “am fond of,” or “am awfully keen on,” or “like very much.” Most men were afraid of the word; she was glad he was not. And immediately she thought: “If I had said it, it would have sounded schoolgirlish. What is it that gives dignity to what he says?” “What are they?” she asked. “The biggest and most important thing in the world,” he replied, “is life. Life is worth living, there’s not a doubt about that. But it’s more worth living for some people than for others. And the things that make or tend to make those differences are among those infinitely bigger things of which I spoke.”