As she flew upstairs for her music, saying, "I'm all right. I can do it all right," she was half-conscious that her provisional success with her class had very little to do with her bounding joy. That success had not so much given her anything to be glad about--it had rather removed an obstacle of gladness which was waiting to break forth. She was going to stay on. That was the point. She would stay in this wonderful place.... She came singing down through the quiet house--the sunlight poured from bedroom windows through open doors. She reached the quiet saal. Here stood the great piano, its keyboard open under the light of the French window opposite the door through which she came. Behind the great closed swing doors the girls were talking over their _raccommodage_. Miriam paid no attention to them. She would ignore them all. She did not even need to try to ignore them. She felt strong and independent. She would play, to herself. She would play something she knew perfectly, a Grieg lyric or a movement from a Beethoven Sonata ... on this gorgeous piano ... and let herself go, and listen. That was music ... not playing things, but listening to Beethoven.... It must be Beethoven ... Grieg was different ... acquired ... like those strange green figs Pater had brought from Tarring ... Beethoven had always been real. It was all growing clearer and clearer.... She chose the first part of the first movement of the Sonata Pathétique. That she knew she could play faultlessly. It was the last thing she had learned, and she had never grown weary of practising slowly through its long bars of chords. She had played it at her last music-lesson ... dear old Stroodie walking up and down the long drilling-room.... "Steady the bass"; "grip the chords," then standing at her side and saying in the thin light sneery part of his voice, "You can ... you've got hands like umbrellas" ... and showing her how easily she could stretch two notes beyond his own span. And then marching away as she played and crying out to her standing under the high windows at the far end of the room, "Let it go! Let it go!" And she had almost forgotten her wretched self, almost heard the music....