‘All the tunes sounded so much alike. Want of taste on my part, of course. However, my cousins—Arabella and Jessie, nice girls, but domineering—insisted that I should go to concerts, so I went. They both sing and play, and wanted to improve their style, they said; selfishly ignoring the fact that I had no style to improve; and allowing me to pay for all the tickets. One morning—splendid weather for snowballing; I wished myself young again and at Winchester, as I looked at the streets—we went to a Recital, which took place in a dreary-looking house near Manchester-square, by the kind permission of the tenant. The concert people might as well have borrowed a roomy family vault. It would have been quite as cheerful. Well, we surrendered our tickets—parallelograms of sky-blue pasteboard, and uncommonly dear at half a guinea—to a shabby footman, who ushered us up-stairs over a threadbare stair carpet to a faded drawing-room, where we found some elderly ladies of the dowdy order, and a miscellaneous collection of antique gentlemen in well-worn coats of exploded cut. These I took to represent the musical nobility. It was not a cheerful concert. First came a quartette, in ever so many parts, like a dull sermon; a quartette for a piano, violoncello, and two fiddles, with firstly, and secondly, and thirdly. Every now and then, when the violoncello gave forth rather deeper groans than usual, or one of the fiddles prolonged a wire-drawn note, the musical nobility gave a little gasp, and looked at one another, and one of the old gentlemen tapped the lid of his snuffbox. After the quartette we had a pianoforte solo, to my unenlightened mind an arid waste of tuneless chords, and little meandering runs to nowhere in particular, a little less interesting than a problem in Euclid. I prefer my cousin Arabella’s hearty thumping, and frantic rushes up and down the keyboard, to this milk-and-water style, which is, I understand, classical. Number three was a vocal duet by Handel, which I won’t describe, as it lulled me into a placid slumber. When I reopened my eyes there was a gentle murmur of admiration floating in the atmosphere; and I beheld a lady dressed in black, with a sheet of music in her hand, waiting for the end of the symphony.’ ‘_The_ lady, I suppose,’ said Lucius, duly interested.