prosperous musical people, something that kept them apart from the world where they made their living.... They worked hard in two worlds ... when Mr. Bowdoin was at the piano again they all sat easy and at home, in easy attitudes, affectionately listening. The room seemed somehow less dark and their forms much more visible and bigger. The empty white coffee cups standing about on the table caught the light. Miriam's stood alone at the end of the table. Mr. Bowdoin had taken it from her but without entering into conversation and she was left with her prepared remark about the piano and her plea for a performance of the Tannhäuser overture going unsaid round and round in her mind. She sat ashamed before the restrained impersonal enthusiasm that filled the room. Even Miss Rogers was sitting less stiffly. Her own stiffness must make it obvious that she was not in a musical circle. Musical circles had a worldly savoir-faire of their own, the thing that was to be found everywhere in the world. To be in one would mean having to talk like that eager worshipping woman or to be calm and easily supercilious and secret like Miss Rogers. Even here the men were apart from the women; to join the men would be easy enough, to say exactly what one thought and talk about all sorts of things and laugh. But the women would hate that and one would have to be intimate with the women, and rave about music and musicians. Mr. Bowdoin had probably thought she would talk to those women. But after talking to them how could one listen to music? Their very presence made it almost impossible. She was unable to lose herself in the Wagner overture. It sounded out thinly into the room. Paderewski was looking away to where there was nothing but music sounding in a wooden room just inside an immense forest somewhere in Europe. She began thinking secretly of the world waiting for her outside and felt that she was affronting everyone in the room; treacherously and not visibly as before. She had got away from them but they did not know it. Mr. Bowdoin passed from the overture which was vociferously applauded and went on and on till she ceased altogether to try to listen and he became a stranger, sitting there playing seriously and laboriously alone at his piano.... She wished he would play a waltz--and she suddenly blushed to find herself sitting there at all....