Meanwhile, Mrs. Le Moine’s fiddling held the club spell-bound. She played English folk-melodies and Hungarian dances, and the boys’ feet shuffled in tune. Londoners are musical people, on the whole; no one can say that, though they like bad music, they don’t like good music, too; they are catholic in taste. Eddy Oliver, who liked anything he heard, from a barrel-organ to a Beethoven Symphony, was a typical specimen. His foot, too, tapped in tune; his blood danced in him to the lilt of laughter and passion and gay living that the quick bow tore from the strings. He knew enough, technically, about music, to know that this was wonderful playing; and he remembered what he had heard before, that this brilliant, perverse, childlike-looking person, with her great brooding eyes and half-sullen brows, and the fiddle tucked away under her round chin, was a genius. He believed he had heard that she had some Hungarian blood in her, besides the Irish strain. Certainly the passion and the fire in her, that was setting everyone’s blood stirring so, could hardly be merely English. At the end of a wild dance tune, and during riotous applause, Eddy turned to Datcherd, who stood close to him, and laughed. “My word!” was all he said. Datcherd smiled a little at him, and Eddy liked him more than ever. “They like it, don’t they?” said Datcherd. “Look how they like it. They like this; and then we go and give them husks; vulgarities from the comic operas.” “Oh, but they like those, too,” said Eddy. Datcherd said impatiently, “They’d stop liking them if they could always get anything decent.” “But surely,” said Eddy, “the more things they like the better.” Datcherd, looking round at him to see if he meant it, said, “Good heavens!” and was frowningly silent. An intolerant man, and ill-tempered at that, Eddy decided, but liked him very much all the same.