After supper Mr. Pinner sang very neatly in a small clear tenor voice an English translation of Es war ein König im Thule. Miriam longed for the German words; Mr. Pinner cancelled even the small remainder of the German sentiment by his pronunciation of the English rendering; "there was a king of old tame" he declared and so on throughout the song. Alma followed with a morsel of Chopin. The performance drove Miriam into a rage. Mr. Pinner had murdered his German ballad innocently, his little Oxford voice and his false vowels did not conceal the pleasure he took in singing his unimagined little song, Alma played her piece at her audience, every line of her face and body proclaiming it fine music, the right sort of music, and deprecating all the compositions that were not "music." It was clear that her taste had become cultivated, that she _knew_ now, that the scales had fallen from her eyes as they had fallen from Miriam's eyes in Germany; but the result sent Miriam back with a rush to cheap music, sentimental "obvious" music, shapely waltzes, the demoralising chromatics of Gounod, the demoralising descriptive passion pieces of Chaminade, those things by Liszt whom somebody had called a charlatan who wrote to make your blood leap and your feet dance and made your blood leap and your feet dance ... why not?... Her mind went on amazed at the rushing together of her ideas on music, at the amount of certainty she had accumulated. Any of these things she declared to herself played, really _played_, would be better than Alma's Chopin. The Wilsons had discovered "good" music, as so many English people had, but they were all wrong about music; nearly all English people were. Only in England would either the song or the solo have been possible. The song was innocent, the solo was an insult. The player's air of superiority to other music was insufferable; her way of playing out bar by bar of the rain on the roof as if she were giving a lesson was a piece of intellectual snobbery. Chopin she had never met, never felt or glimpsed. Chopin was a shape, an endless delicate stern rhythm as stern as anything in music; all he was came through that, could come only through it and she played tricks with the shape, falsified all the values, outdid the worst trickery of the music she was deprecating. At the end of the performance which was applauded with a subdued reverence, Miriam eased her agony by humming the opening phase of the motive again and again in her brain and very nearly aloud, it was such a perfect rhythmic drop. For long she was haunted and tortured by Alma's horrible holding back of the third note for emphasis where there was no emphasis ... it was like ... finding a _wart_ at the dropping end of a fine tendril, she was telling herself furiously while she fended off Alma's cajoling efforts to make her join in a game of cards. She felt too angry and too suffering--what _was_ this wrong thing about music in all