Out of all these things, which were but trivialities, pleasant, unthinking hours for all else concerned, several points stood out for Michael, points new and illuminating. The first was the simplicity of it all, the spontaneousness with which pleasure was born if only you took off your clothes, so to speak, and left them on the bank while you jumped in. All his life he had buttoned his jacket and crammed his hat on to his head. The second was the sense, indefinable but certain, that Hermann and Sylvia between them were the high priests of this memorable orgie. He himself had met, at dreadful, solemn evenings when Lady Ashbridge and his father stood at the head of the stairs, the two eminent actors who had romped to-night, and found them exceedingly stately personages, just as no doubt they had found him an icy and awkward young man. But they, like him, had taken their note on those different occasions from their environment. Perhaps if his father and mother came here . . . but Michael’s imagination quailed before such a supposition. The third point, which gradually through these weeks began to haunt him more and more, was the personality of Sylvia. He had never come across a girl who in the least resembled her, probably because he had not attempted even to find in a girl, or to display in himself, the signals, winked across from one to the other, of human companionship. Always he had found a difficulty in talking to a girl, because he had, in his self-consciousness, thought about what he should say. There had been the cabalistic question of sex ever in front of him, a thing that troubled and deterred him. But Sylvia, with her hand on his shoulder, absorbed in her singing, and directing him only as she would have pressed the pedal of the piano if she had been playing to herself, was no more agitating than if she had been a man; she was just singing, just using him to help her singing. And even while Michael registered to himself this charming annihilation of sex, which allowed her to be to him no more than her brother was--less, in fact, but on the same plane--she had come to the end of her song, patted him on the back, as she would have patted anybody else, with a word of thanks, and, for him, suddenly leaped into significance. It was not only a singer who had sung, but an individual one called Sylvia Falbe. She took her place, at present a most inconspicuous one, on the back-cloth before which Michael’s life was acted, towards which, when no action, so to speak, was taking place, his eyes naturally turned themselves. His father and mother were there, Francis also and Aunt Barbara, and of course, larger than the rest, Hermann. Now Sylvia was discernible, and, as the days went by and their meetings multiplied, she became bigger, walked into a nearer perspective. It did not occur to Michael, rightly, to imagine himself at all in love with her, for he was not. Only she had asserted herself on his consciousness.