"It would have come to all the same in the end," she said, laughing, "if you had sent a general order to the Stores, and left the details to them; and it would have saved a vast amount of energy." "Ah!" said Mona. When the two girls were together, Mona felt about petty things what Doris felt about great ones, that one must not expect absolute sympathy even from one's dearest friends. By common consent, however, they dropped into St James's Hall for an hour, when their work was over, to refresh themselves with a little music. The overture to Tannhäuser was the last item on the programme, and Mona would have walked twenty miles any day to hear that. It was dark when they left the building, and the fog had reduced the sphere of each street lamp to a radius of two or three yards; but Mona could easily have found her way home to "blessed Bloomsbury" with her eyes shut. Doris was going to the Reynolds' to supper, to meet Lucy for the first time, and her aunt's brougham was to fetch her at night. "Listen, Mona," she said suddenly, as they made their way along Piccadilly, "there are two men behind us discussing your beloved Tannhäuser." This was interesting. Mona mentally relinquished her knick-knacks, and pricked up her ears. At first she could only hear something about "sheer noise," "hideous crash of chords," "gospel of din"; but a moment later the hand that rested on Doris's arm twitched involuntarily, for the mellow, cultured voice that took up the discussion was strangely familiar. "My dear fellow, to my mind that is precisely the point of the whole thing. The Pilgrims' Chorus is beautiful and suggestive when one hears it simply and alone, in its own special sphere, so to speak; but when it rises clear, steady, and unvarying, without apparent exertion, above all the reiterated noise and crash and distraction of the world, the flesh, and the devil,--why, then, it is an inspiration. It becomes triumphant by sheer force of continuing to be itself." The first voice said something about "want of melody." and then the deep bass went on,-- "I am not at all learned in the discussion from a technical point of view. To my mind it is simply a question of making the opera an organic whole,--not a collection of works of art, but one work of art. Take _Don Juan_ for instance----" The men turned down a side street, and the voices died away in the distance. "What a beautiful voice!" said Doris. "Yes." "Do you know, Mona, I think that must have been a nice man." "Because of the voice?" "Because of the voice, and because of what the voice said. Young men don't talk like that as a rule." "How do you know he was young?" "I am sure that 'my dear fellow' was not more than twenty-five." "Twenty-seven, I should think," said Mona reflectively. Doris laughed. "You are very exact. Or is it that you have gone back to the inkstands?" Mona sighed. "Yes," she said gravely, "I have gone back to the inkstands."