Theodosia felt abashed before the superior skill and she drew her bow nervously over the strings at the test lesson. She was stifled into a few days of inactivity until the new gestures set within her. She must learn to hold the violin. To approach it with the bow. To observe the right angle. To listen to the tone and learn the acoustics of the instrument. Sometimes the dark woman would answer a question by playing a phrase, a skurry of phrases, and Theodosia was half afraid of these replies, knowing that she missed a part. Not virtuosity but good playing. The words sang in her mind and broke a new world into a firmament, a world fuller than the old. Theory, harmony, musical history, musical literature, technique, the legato, the perfect legato, the singing violin tone. The ragged chrysanthemums bloomed along the front of the house where the south sun shone, and the fallen leaves made every footstep clatter. The fields beyond the town, where they arose on the hills and were seen from the windows of the house, had lost their rough lines as they were turned under by the plow for the winter grains, were set in order for the next growing year. Her eyes, lifted from the strings, would rest far away on the hill field where the earth had been made new and where it ran perpetually now with her singing legato, the brown earth laid out brown in the autumn sun. The music teacher came each week, her talk a bright flash from the world far outside. She talked in half with her music and with her quick hands, but her speech was crisp and clear. In her the master walked out upon the concert stage and worked his bow over the strings; she gathered intensely in her darkness and in the vibrant speed of her facile hands, her mouth easily turning, her strong slender limbs swaying, or she tapped the bow against her skirt as she told how the master played a movement. Her fingers were little brains secreting the music of thought. Around her a peculiar, scintillating half-brilliance spread like a fog of things half-known, half-sensed; it caught at the imagination and kindled it but gave it insufficient fuel. The man and the instrument were one. An interpretation of life. Of mind, mood, thought, by the way of sound. Man is speaking here. His voice. Sound brought to high refinements, nuances, exquisite variations to make a speech for the spirit of man. The musician knew; she flashed out of her darkness. These were days of unsatisfied knowing. One could never have enough.