expression in those faces that Paula wouldn't look at. The half-concealed
impatience, the anticipatory boredom, showed through so unfaltering a
determination to do and express to the end the precisely correct thing.
Even her father's anger looked out through a mask like that.

LaChaise, from his corner said something in French that Mary didn't
catch. Novelli straightened his back. And in that instant before a note
was sounded, Mary's excitement mounted higher. The absorption of those
three musicians, the intensity of their preoccupation, told her that the
something she had expected was going to happen--now. But she did not know
that it was going to happen to her.

Long ago the family had acquiesced in Mary's assertion that she was not
in the least musical and in her stubborn refusal to "take" anything, even
the most elementary course of lessons on the piano. She had been allowed
to grow up in an ignorance almost unique in these days, of the whole
mystery of musical notation and phraseology, an ignorance that might be
reckoned the equivalent of a special talent.

Later, indeed, she had made the discovery--or what would have been a
discovery if she had fully admitted it to herself--that music sometimes
exerted a special power over her emotions. Whether it was a certain sort
of music that created the mood or a certain sort of mood that was capable
of responding to music, she had never seriously inquired. The critical
jargon of the wiseacres always irritated her. She supposed it meant
something because they seemed intelligible to each other but she rather
enjoyed indulging the presumption that it did not. When she went to
concerts, she liked to go alone, or at least to be let alone, to sit back
passively and allow the variegated tissue of sound to envelop her spirit
as it would. If it bored her, as it frequently did, there was no harm