Not yet had she begun to trouble him, and there was no sign, either external or intimate, in his mind that he was sickening with the splendid malady. Indeed, the significance she held for him was rather that, though she was a girl, she presented none of the embarrassments which that sex had always held for him. She grew in comradeship; he found himself as much at ease with her as with her brother, and her charm was just that which had so quickly and strongly attracted Michael to Hermann. She was vivid in the same way as he was; she had the same warm, welcoming kindliness--the same complete absence of pose. You knew where you were with her, and hitherto, when Michael was with one of the young ladies brought down to Ashbridge to be looked at, he only wished that wherever he was he was somewhere else. But with Sylvia he had none of this self-consciousness; she was bonne camarade for him in exactly the same way as she was bonne camarade to the rest of the multitude which thronged the Sunday evenings, perfectly at ease with them, as they with her, in relationship entirely unsentimental. But through these weeks, up to this foggy November afternoon, Michael’s most conscious preoccupation was his music. Falbe’s principles in teaching were entirely heretical according to the traditional school; he gave Michael no scale to play, no dismal finger-exercise to fill the hours. “What is the good of them?” he asked. “They can only give you nimbleness and strength. Well, you shall acquire your nimbleness and strength by playing what is worth playing. Take good music, take Chopin or Bach or Beethoven, and practise one particular etude or fugue or sonata; you may choose anything you like, and learn your nimbleness and strength that way. Read, too; read for a couple of hours every day. The written language of music must become so familiar to you that it is to you precisely what a book or a newspaper is, so that whether you read it aloud--which is playing--or sit in your arm-chair with your feet on the fender, reading it not aloud on the piano, but to yourself, it conveys its definite meaning to you. At your lessons you will have to read aloud to me. But when you are reading to yourself, never pass over a bar that you don’t understand. It has got to sound in your head, just as the words you read in a printed book really sound in your head if you read carefully and listen for them. You know exactly what they would be like if you said them aloud. Can you read, by the way? Have a try.” Falbe got down a volume of Bach and opened it at random. “There,” he said, “begin at the top of the page.” “But I can’t,” said Michael. “I shall have to spell it out.” “That’s just what you mustn’t do. Go ahead, and don’t pause till you get to the bottom of the page. Count; start each bar when it comes to its turn, and play as many notes as you can in it.”