importance, and piqued that she had failed to hold his interest. Both
impressions were of a quicker vivacity than was at all the habit of her
maturity. She told herself, surprised, that she had not felt this little
sharp sting of wounded personal vanity since she was a girl. What did
she care whether she had bored him or not? But it was with all her
faculties awakened and keen that she sat down before the piano and
called out to them, "What would you like?"

They returned the usual protestations that they would like anything she
would play, and after a moment's hesitation . . . it was always a leap in
the dark to play to people about whose musical capacities you hadn't the
faintest idea . . . she took out the Beethoven Sonata album and turned to
the Sonata Pathétique. Beethoven of the early middle period was the
safest guess with such entirely unknown listeners. For all that she
really knew, they might want her to play Chaminade and Moskowsky. Mr.
Welles, the nice old man, might find even them above his comprehension.
And as for Marsh, she thought with a resentful toss of her head that he
was capable of saying off-hand, that he was really bored by all
music--and conveying by his manner that it was entirely the fault of the
music. Well, she would show him how she could play, at least.

She laid her hands on the keys; and across those little smarting,
trivial personalities there struck the clear, assured dignity and worth
of her old friend . . . was there ever such a friend as that rough old
German who had died so long before she was born? No one could say the
human race was ignoble or had never deserved to live, who knew his
voice. In a moment she was herself again.

Those well-remembered opening chords, they were by this time not merely
musical sounds. They had become something within her, of her own being,