He did not want now the fury or grief or laughter of Beethoven; not now the lofty tenderness or robust passion of Johannes Brahms. He took down his one-volume edition of the _Well-Tempered Clavichord_ and glanced at a memory-stirring litter of pencil marks made long ago in the curly script of his teacher Michael Brooks. Mr. Brooks had died before the war, very old and partly blind. He might live another hundred years in these marks, far longer in the spreading influence of his fifty years of teaching, the impetus he gave to other lives continuing beyond any knowledge or measuring. _Very good, Terence!... More slow trill practice absolutely essential!! Andante does not mean Adagio. In this Prelude schmaltz is possible but I do not like it. Excellent but you could do better. Bring out the inner voices._ Mr. Brooks grew vivid in memory, speaking with difficulty and panting breath because of age and the burden of fat that seemed (till you learned better) as though it might block his pudgy improbable hands away from the keyboard entirely. He had been seventy when Terence at age eight began lessons; he went on teaching twelve years thereafter. Terence remembered the gray eyes, tiny-appearing, sometimes inflamed, in folds of drooping lids and fat, the completely hairless skull rising to a peak, the wondrously ugly features that after the first impact of astonishment left the word "ugly" without meaning. "You think the Fugues are dry, Terence? Bring out the inner voices.... See, Terence, all the composers have something for you. But when you are unhappy--" blinking, sighing, coughing; and Terence recalled a child's botheration, dread of giggles, at an old man's prolonged throat-clearing, guttural noises, conversational spray, habit of patting forlornly at the air when a needed word was gone from him--"or when you have discovered that happiness is only a sometime thing at best, not too important, then try Bach, Terence, try Bach. Because he will let you enter a place where you become bigger than sadness or happiness. And bring out the inner voices." He set the old book on the piano. Hands and brain were tired, the hour late, though the neighboring apartment-dwellers were tolerant and often kept their mechanical music perking until after midnight. For a while he was in that place: _Well, Mr. Brooks, "container and thing contained": aren't we always bigger than what stirs within us? All the same it was a good way to talk to a child._ But the very facility of his hands betrayed him, leaving his mind too free. Good at first, to continue private thought while Bach was speaking, but then only another troublesome dividing of the self. Terence's father, not a patient man, would have said at this point or sooner: "God-sake, Terry, make up your mind!"