“Never let me hear you mention it. Not whilst I live. The worst piece of impudence that ever I saw in life. Enough virtue in a Bell, in a Montford, to carry along a little excess weight. Never let me hear a sign of this again. Get about your business.” Hard words, cracked with age and anger, spent strength, and he trembled in his chair. Tone left his words high as jagged missiles thrust upon the air of the room. She was weeping now. “Get about your business. Get on. Get outen here. Away.” * * * * * She was playing scales all morning in her room, using difficult intervals, her content running now with the cry of the tone and settling to the grace of her fingers as they crumpled over the strings. Her hands were pliant but narrow, not good fiddle hands, the teacher had said. They were her mother’s hands much diminished. She was hearing the words of the teacher, her master, as they discoursed of vibration. She was, the teacher, herself an epitome of the fiddle, her quick graceful standing figure, her hand that was broad and flexible in the palm. She wondered if anything else touched this woman. The inner psychic vibration which should be reflected in the rapid vibrations of the fingers on the strings, such as this was her meat and drink. The greater master had played a Chopin Nocturne for one “eating the bitter bread of exile.” “It should be easy, though, to make a dethroned king weep,” she said. She let her fingers have their joy in their skill knowing that an ironic undertow had set upon her thought. Enough virtue in a Bell to carry along any quantity of excess weight, Anthony had said to her, his anger in a flame. The two daughters of black Josie’s girl, Deb, were grown women now. She remembered them as cooks or nurses or laundresses. They were named Americy and Lethe, and now she remembered vividly one warm September day when she had stopped Lethe on the street and asked her to do some laundry work. The reply had been a faintly smiling refusal, some evil in it. She recalled now her tone of mind and her bodily attitude as she had worked the end of her parasol between the bricks of the pavement, a gesture to accompany the slightly forward pose of her head, her manner condescending, amused, expectant. “Could I get you to do some fine laundry work for me, Lethe?”