Through the buying and selling of the town, the greetings and passings here and there, a mishap had begun to be felt. A young woman, a girl named Minnie Harter, was known to be bearing a child. Whispers of this had floated over the gossip of the streets and the porches. Minnie was a plump soft girl who limped slightly when she walked. She lived with her parents at the end of the street, near the house where Conway had lived. Whispers said that she had had too many intimates. The long roadway up the avenue under the trees now led to Minnie’s door as the shock of her ill-doing mounted and frayed out to a settled fact. The rumor of Minnie came upon Theodosia as she worked over the adagio one summer morning, or it faintly colored her sense of her act as she darned the household linens that were now worn and thin. Looking intently at the lapping threads of the cloth as she darned, she penetrated the folding lines of cotton, one up and one down, over and over, they unsatisfied and completed in one instant, and she searched minutely into the flash of recognition that had accompanied her first seeing when reality had lain on the instant just behind the warp and weft of these accurately braided lines of old worn cloth. “Some truth is near at hand,” she thought, striving to regain the acumen of the lost moment. She became more cool and more abstracted, passing to another mood regarding her playing, as if some cold disinterested part stood outside herself. In this temper she searched into the limitations of her hand, at the end of an hour of duos with her master, and pried out each truth, flinching from nothing, testing her reach as if it were the reach of some other musician, some hand remote from her in which she had only a curious interest. “And that marks the limit of what you can do in that direction.... Your mind can go beyond your hand....” The master made her points clear. Theodosia leaned over the instrument, her mind cool before these words, a sensation as of a keen blade cutting a cold path down her back near her spine. “Then I’ll make a new instrument,” her sad arrogance said. Determination yielded nothing before the words of her master. “I’ll not be stopped,” she said. “If this instrument can’t serve me.... I’m still here.” At practice her mind turned continually to Conway, relating to him the curious limitations of musical machines, tools, implements, and retold to him her predicament in half-amused despair that yielded nothing. “We’re here,” she said, addressing Song, taking Conway with her as she walked impudently up to the face of Song. “They can remake the thing,” she said. “They must make a new kind.... You’re not done with us yet.”