Her appearance eventually in the hall, a long, many-windowed room, with great bowls of cut flowers on gate-legged tables and old dressers, was celebrated by Salo Impf with an improvisation on the piano that was filled with spring and received with noisy approval. Imbued with a certain amount of crude tact, the men of the party did nothing more than pay tribute to Lola with their eyes while they surrounded Lady Cheyne as though she were a queen, as indeed she was, having it in her power not only to provide them with bed and board but to bring them out and give them a chance in a country always ready to support talent. It was a funny sight to see this amazingly fat, kind woman pouring tea at a tiny table into tiny cups surrounded by people who seemed to be perpetually hungry, but who sang even while they ate, and laughed and jabbered in between. “What would Simpkins say if he could see me here?” thought Lola. “And Mother and Ernest and Sir Peter Chalfont—and Lady Feo?” But she felt happy and in a way comforted among these people. Like her, they were all struggling towards a goal, all striving after something for which they had served their apprenticeship. Not one of them had yet successfully emerged and they were living on what Mrs. Rumbold called, “the scraggy diet of hope.” It did her good to be among them at that moment, to hear their discussions in amazingly broken English of a début in London, to be aware of the extraordinary encouragement which they gave to each other, without jealousy,—which was so rare. She found herself listening enthralled to the arias sung by Anna Stezzel, and the Grieg songs which were so perfectly played by Impf. But it was when Zalouhou stood up with his violin and played some of the wistful folk songs of his country that she sat with her hands clasped together, leaning forward and moved to a deep emotion. Hunger, the daily wrestle with surly earth, illness, the subjection to a crushing autocracy, and beneath it self-preservation,—they were all in these sad, fierce songs, which sometimes burst into passionate resentment and at others laughed a little and jogged along. What a story they told,—so much rougher and so much sterner than her own. They gave her courage to go forward but they left her uncertain as to what was to be her next step.