that like a snail crossed in love--perhaps he was right. But something had gone wrong because I played with the intention of commenting on Alma's way of playing.... That was not all. It did not end there. There was something in music when one played alone, without thoughts. Something present, and _new_. Not affected by life or by any kind of people.... In Beethoven. _Beethoven_ was the answer to the silence of the room. She imagined a sonata ringing out into it, and defiantly attacked a remembered fragment. It crashed into the silence. The uncaring room might rock and sway. Its rickety furniture shatter to bits. _Something_ must happen under the outbreak of her best reality. She was on firm ground. The room was nowhere. She cast sidelong half-fearful exultant glances. The room woke into an affronted silence. She felt astonishment at the sudden loud outbreak of assertions turning to scornful disgust. Entrenched behind the disgust something was declaring that she had no right to her understanding of the music; no business to get away into it and hide her defects and get out of things and escape the proper exposure of her failure. In a man it would have been excusable. The room would have listened with respectful flattering indulgent tolerance till it was over and then have relapsed untouched. This dingy woman playing with the directness and decision of a man was like some strange beast in the room.... It was too late to go back. She could only rush on re-affirming her assertion, shouting in a din that must be reaching up and down the house and echoing out into the street the thing that was stronger than the feeling that had prompted her appeal for sympathy. It was the everlasting parting of the ways, the wrenching away that always came.... The Baileys were going on downstairs with their planning, the Norwegian busy with his cold watchful grappling with England; all of them far away, flouted. The room became a background indistinguishable from any other indifferent background. All round her was height and depth, a sense of vastness and grandeur beyond anything to be seen or heard, yet stretching back like a sheltering wing over the past to her earliest memories and forward ahead out of sight. The piano had changed. It gave out a depth and fulness of tone. By careful management she could avoid the abrupt contrast between the action of the pedals. Presently the glowing and aching of the muscles of her forearms forced her to leave off. She swung round. The forgotten room was filled with friendly light. Triumphant echoes filled its wide spaces, pressed against the windows, filtered out into the quiet street out and away into London. When the room was still there was an unbroken stillness in the house and the street. Striking thinly across it came the tones of the solitary unaccompanied violin. CHAPTER III 1