He was revealing himself as he was when alone, admitting Beethoven's vision of life as well as seeing the marvellous things Beethoven did with his themes? But he liked best the slamming, hee-hawing rollick of the last movement.... Because it did so much with a theme that was almost nothing.... _Bang_, toodle-oodle-oodle, _Bang_, toodle-_oodle_-oodle, _Bang_ toodle-oodle-oodle-_oo_. A lumpish phrase; a Clementi finger exercise played suddenly in startling fortissimo by an impatient schoolboy; smashed out with the full force of the orchestra, taken up, slammed here and there, up and down, by a leaping, plunging, heavy hoofed pantaloon, approving each variation with loud guffaws.... The sly swift dig-in-the-ribs of the sudden pianissimos.... To watch a shape adds interest to listening. But something disappears in listening with the form put first. Hearing only form is a kind of perfect happiness. But in coming back there is a reproach; as if it had been a kind of truancy.... People who care only for form think themselves superior. Then there is something wrong with them. On the landing table a letter lay waiting for the post. She passed by, gladly not caring to glance. But a tingling in her shoulders drew her back. She had reached the garden door. The music now pouring busily through from the next room urged her forward. But once outside she would have become a party to bright reasonableness, a foolish frontage, caricatured from behind. She fled back along her path to music that was once more the promise of joy ... to read the address of one of Alma's tradespeople, a distasteful reminder of the wheels of dull work perpetually running under the surface of beauty. But this morning it would not attain her.... It was not Alma's hand, but the small running shape like a scroll, each part a tiny perfection. She bent over it. _Miss Edna Prout...._ This, then, was what she had come back to find; poison for the day. The house was silent as a desert; empty, swept clear of life. The roomful of music was in another world. Alone in it, he had written to her and then sat down, thinking of her, to his music. * * * * * Complications are enlivening.... Within the sunlight, in the great spread of glistening sea, in the touch of the free air and the look of the things set down on the bench there was a lively intensity. A demand for search; for a thought that would obliterate the smear on the blue and gold of the day. The thought had been there even at the moment of shock. The following tumult was the effort to find it. To get round behind the shock and slay it before it could slay. To agree. That was the answer. Not to care. To show how much you care by deliberately not caring? People show disapproval of their own actions by defending them. By deliberately not hiding or defending them, they show off a version of their actions. That they don't themselves accept.