Here, then, were two of the initiations that had come, with the swiftness of the spate in Alpine valleys at the melting of the snow, upon Michael; his own liberty, namely, and this new sense of music. He had groped, he felt now, like a blind man in that direction, guided only by his instinct, and on a sudden the scales had fallen from his eyes, and he knew that his instinct had guided him right. But not less epoch-making had been the dawn of friendship. Throughout the week his intimacy with Hermann Falbe had developed, shooting up like an aloe flower, and rising into sunlight above the mists of his own self-occupied shyness, which had so darkly beset him all life long. He had given the best that he knew of himself to his cousin, but all the time there had never quite been absent from his mind his sense of inferiority, a sort of aching wonder why he could not be more like Francis, more careless, more capable of enjoyment, more of a normal type. But with Falbe he was able for the first time to forget himself altogether; he had met a man who did not recall him to himself, but took him clean out of that tedious dwelling which he knew so well and, indeed, disliked so much. He was rid for the first time of his morbid self-consciousness; his anchor had been taken up from its dragging in the sand, and he rode free, buoyed on waters and taken by tides. It did not occur to him to wonder whether Falbe thought him uncouth and awkward; it did not occur to him to try to be pleasant, a job over which poor Michael had so often found himself dishearteningly incapable; he let himself be himself in the consciousness that this was sufficient. They had spent the morning together before this second performance of Parsifal that closed their series, in the woods above the theatre, and Michael, no longer blurting out his speeches, but speaking in the quiet, orderly manner in which he thought, discussed his plans. “I shall come back to London with you after Munich,” he said, “and settle down to study. I do know a certain amount about harmony already; I have been mugging it up for the last three years. But I must do something as well as learn something, and, as I told you, I’m going to take up the piano seriously.” Falbe was not attending particularly. “A fine instrument, the piano,” he remarked. “There is certainly something to be done with a piano, if you know how to do it. I can strum a bit myself. Some keys are harder than others--the black notes.” “Yes; what of the black notes?” asked Michael. “Oh! they’re black. The rest are white. I beg your pardon!” Michael laughed. “When you have finished drivelling,” he said, “you might let me know.” “I have finished drivelling, Michael. I was thinking about something else.” “Not really?” “Really.”