She sat drawn up in her chair very tall and thin in a clumsy dress with a high stiff collarband. Her head and hair above her thin dingy neck were--common. Undoubtedly. She looked like a post-office young lady. She was quite old, twenty-seven or twenty-eight. While the other people came in she sat very still and self-possessed, as if nothing were happening. Was that dignity? Not attempting to hide your peculiarities and defects, but just keeping perfectly still and calm whatever happened? There were two men and another woman. They stood about in the gloom near the door while Mr. Bowdoin carried away their things and came back and murmured Miss Rogers and Miss Henderson, and then sat down in a row on the kitchen chairs in line near the piano. Their faces were above the reach of the lamplight. Their bodies had the subdued manner of the less important sitters in a parish church. Mr. Bowdoin was putting the little lamp on the top of the piano. The light ran up the wall. The picture was a large portrait of Paderewski. It was amongst Miriam's records of Queen's Hall posters, coming and going amongst other posters of musicians, passed by with a hurried glance, soon obliterated by the oncoming of the blazing flower-baskets as she hurried down Langham Place sore with her effort to forget the reminders of music beyond her reach. Looking at it now she felt as if all she had missed were suddenly brought to her; her sense of thwarting and loss was swept away. She sat up relieved, bathed in sunshine. The room was full of life and warmth and golden light. She eagerly searched the features until Mr. Bowdoin took the lamp off the piano and sat down murmuring I will give you a sonata of Bytoven. The outline of the face shone down through the gloom. She could recall each feature in perfect distinctness. All the soft weakness of the musical temperament was there, the thing that made people call musicians a soft weak lot. But there was something else; perhaps it was in all musicians who were such great executors as to be almost composers. The curious conscious half-pleading sensitive weakness of the mouth and chin were dreadful; a sort of nakedness as if a whole weak nature were escaping there for everyone to see; and then suddenly reined in; held in and back by the pose of the reined-in head. The great aureole of fluffy hair was shaped and held in shape by the same power. The whole head, soft and weak in all its details, was resolute and strong.... If the face were raised to look outwards it would be weak, pained and suffering and almost querulously sorrowful; but in its own right pose it was happy and strong. The pose of the head gave it its grip on the features and the hair and made _beauty_. The pose of _listening_. The eyes saw nothing. The reined-in face was listening, intently, from a burning bush.... There was some reason not yet understood why musicians and artists wore long hair.