Catherine sat down in front of the eighteen-guinea English masterpiece. Mrs. Lazenby had put a covering of red plush on the top of the instrument and crowned that with a number of shells with black spikes, and a lithograph of New Brighton Tower and Promenade in a plush frame of an aggressively green hue. Catherine removed these impedimenta and opened the lid. She decided to practise for exactly one hour. Later on she might have to do two, three, four, five or even more hours per day, but for a start one hour would be ample. She would learn now the extent to which her technique had suffered during her long period of enforced idleness. She would be able to compute the time it would take to recover her lost skill, and could put new hope into her soul by thinking that at last--at last--the tide of her destiny was on the turn.... Rather nervously she began to play.... She started an easy Chopin Ballade.... Her memory served her fairly well, and since the music contained no severe test of technique her hands did not disgrace her. Yet within thirty seconds she stopped playing: she clasped her hands in front of her knees and gazed over the top of the instrument at the caterpillary design on the wallpaper. And in that moment the truth flashed upon her incontrovertibly: it came not altogether as a surprise, for with strange divination she had guessed it long before. And it was simply this: she would never again earn a penny by playing a piano in public: more than that, her failure was complete, obvious and devastatingly convincing: she would never again be able to delude herself with false hopes and distant ambitions. Something in the manner of her playing of the first few bars made her think with astonishing calmness: I cannot play any more.... She wanted to laugh: it seemed such a ridiculous confession.... She looked down at her hands and thought: How do I know that after long practice these may not be of use again? She could not answer.... And yet she knew that she had lost something, something she could not properly describe, but something vital and impossible to replace. Technique, undoubtedly, and memory, and the miraculous flexibility of her ten fingers. And also some subtle and secret capability that in former days had helped her along, something which in a strangely intuitive way she felt to be compounded largely of courage ... courage.... Oh, it was all as incomprehensible as a dream: she felt that she might wake any minute and find herself once again supreme mistress of her hands.... And then, more sanely, she told herself: I cannot play any more ... Finally, as if in querulous petulance at her own reluctance to accept the truth: I really can’t play now, can I? ... Then she began to remember things that Verreker had said of her playing. She remembered a scrap from a review criticism: “the opinion I have held ever since I first heard Miss Weston, that she is a skilful player of considerable talent who