Amnesiacs -- Fiction; England -- Fiction; Mothers and daughters -- Fiction
However, Miss Wilson was certainly a very fine violin figure, and
really striking in long sostenuto notes, with a fine throat and
handsome fingers on her left hand with broad bones, and a handsome
wrist on her bowing-arm where it was wanted. Only now, of course, she
hadn't got her Egyptian bracelet that looked so well, and her hair
wasn't done in a coronet, but only just twisted up anyhow. Besides,
when it's a difficult scherzo and you take it quick, your appearance
of having the concentration of Bonaparte and Julius Caesar, and the
alacrity of a wild cat, doesn't bring out your good points. Give us
an _andante maestoso_ movement, or a _diminuendo rallentando_ that
reaches the very climax and acme of slowness itself just before the
applause comes! It was rather as a meditation in contrasts, though,
that Sally thought thus to herself; for detached musical jerks of
diabolical rapidity, that have to be snapped at with the punctuality
of the mosquito slayer, don't show your rounded lines to advantage,
and make you clench your teeth and glare horribly.
* * * * *
Our story is like the scherzo in one respect: it has to be given in
detached jerks--literary, not musical--and these jerks don't come at
any stated intervals at all. The music was bad enough--so Sally and
Laetitia thought--but the chronicle is more spasmodic still. However,
if you want to know its remaining particulars, you will have to brace
yourself up to tolerating an intermittent style. It is the only one
our means of collecting information admits of.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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