“D’you mean to say you’ve never seen a gramophone yet?” murmured Gerald, frowning and flicking away dust with his handkerchief. They did not mean as much as they appeared to do when they said life was not worth living ...... they had not discovered life. Gerald did not know the meaning of his interest in things. “People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not half so bad with them as they say” ...... “I haven’t. I’ve heard them squeaking inside public houses of course.” “Now’s your chance then. Woa Jemima! That’s the ticket. _Now_ she’s off----” Miriam waited, breathless; eagerly prepared to accept the coming wonder. A sound like the crackling of burning twigs came out into the silence. She remembered her first attempt to use a telephone, the need for concentrating calmly through the preliminary tumult, on the certainty that intelligible sounds would presently emerge, and listened encouragingly for a voice. The crackling changed to a metallic scraping, labouring steadily round and round, as if it would go on for ever; it ceased and an angry stentorian voice seemed to be struggling, half-smothered, in the neck of the trumpet. Miriam gazed, startled, at the yawning orifice, as the voice suddenly escaped and leapt out across the table with a shout--‘Edison-BELL RECord!’ Lightly struck chords tinkled far away, fairy music, sounding clear and distinct on empty space remote from the steady scraping of the machine. Then a song began. The whole machine seemed to sing it; vibrating with effort, sending forth the notes in a jerky staccato, the scarcely touched words clipped and broken to fit the jingling tune; the sustained upper notes at the end of the verse wavered chromatically, as if the machine were using its last efforts to reach the true pitch; it ceased and the far away chords came again, fainter and further away. In the second verse the machine struggled more feebly and slackened its speed, flattened suddenly to a lower key, wavered on, flattening from key to key and collapsed, choking, on a single downward-slurring squeak---- “Oh, but that’s absolutely _perfect_” gasped Miriam. “You want to set it _slower_ silly; it all began too _high_.” “_I_ know, la reine, _he_ knows, he’ll set it slower all right.” This time the voice marched lugubriously forth, with a threatening emphasis on each word; the sustained notes blared wide through their mufflings; yawned out by an angry lion. “My _word_” said Harriett “it’s a funeral this time.” “But it’s _glorious_! Can you make it go as slowly as you like?” “We’ll get it right presently, never fear.”