‘Or about anything else worth caring for?’ he asked her, laughing, but with always that little melancholy note in the laugh. ‘Oh, if you like,’ she said, with a shrug of her white shoulders. ‘I believe you talked to Catherine the whole of the first evening, when you weren’t reading “Hamlet” in the corner, about the arrangements for women’s education at Oxford.’ ‘Could I have found a more respectable subject?’ he inquired of her. ‘The adjective is excellent,’ she said with a little face, as she put her violin into its case. ‘If I remember right, Catherine and I felt it personal. None of us were ever educated, except in arithmetic, sewing, English history, the Catechism, and “Paradise Lost.”--I taught myself French at seventeen, because one Molière wrote plays in it, and German because of Wagner. But they are _my_ French and _my_ German. I wouldn’t advise anybody else to steal them!’ Langham was silent, watching the movements of the girl’s agile fingers. ‘I wonder,’ he said at last, slowly, ‘when I shall play that Beethoven again?’ ‘To-morrow morning if you have a conscience,’ she said dryly; ‘we murdered one or two passages in fine style.’ He looked at her, startled. ‘But I go by the morning train!’ There was an instant silence. Then the violin case shut with a snap. ‘I thought it was to be Saturday,’ she said abruptly. ‘No,’ he answered with a sigh, ‘it was always Friday. There is a meeting in London I must get to to-morrow afternoon.’ ‘Then we shan’t finish these Hungarian duets,’ she said slowly, turning away from him to collect some music on the piano. Suddenly a sense of the difference between the week behind him, with all its ups and downs, its quarrels, its _ennuis_, its moments of delightful intimity, of artistic freedom and pleasure, and those threadbare, monotonous weeks into which he was to slip back on the morrow, awoke in him a mad inconsequent sting of disgust, of self-pity. ‘No, we shall finish nothing,’ he said in a voice which only she could hear, his hands lying on the keys; ‘there are some whose destiny it is never to finish--never to have enough--to leave the feast on the tables and all the edges of life ragged!’ Her lips trembled. They were far away, in the vast room, from the group Lady Charlotte was lecturing. Her nerves were all unsteady with music and feeling, and the face looking down on him had grown pale. ‘We make our own destiny,’ she said impatiently. ‘_We_ choose. It is all our own doing. Perhaps destiny begins things--friendship, for instance; but afterward it is absurd to talk of anything but ourselves. We keep our friends, our chances, our--our joys,’ she went on hurriedly, trying desperately to generalize, ‘or we throw them away wilfully, because we choose.’ Their eyes were riveted on each other.