"To come up-stairs after a hot London banquet, where you have been
sitting, talking the poorest trash, between two empty, worldly women;
and then, perhaps, listening to stories that are dull, or worse, and
see dullness personified in every one of the twelve faces that stare
at you with such sodden respectability through the cigarette smoke;
and then, I say, to come up-stairs, and see moving about among the
knowing selfish people a child with hair like gold thread, and
something of the regretful innocence of heaven in her eyes and
motions. If you can get her to talk to you, so much the better for
you; but if you or she are shy, as generally happens, to watch her
is something. God knows the insidious process by which she will be
transformed, step by step, into one of those godless fine ladies; for
it makes me inclined to pray that anything may happen to her first
that may hinder that development.

"The other thing is, under the same circumstances, to sit down and
hear some rippling melody of Bach's, a tender gavotte or a delicate
rapid fugue, just as it stole on to the paper in that quaint German
garden with the clipped yew-hedges and the tall summer-house in the
corner, in the master's pointed handwriting, calling down by his
magic wand the spirits of the air to aid him in the perfecting of the
exquisite phrase that some Ariel had whispered to him as he walked or
sat.

"To hear that little rill of Paradise breaking out in the glaring
room, not echoed or reflected in the rows of listless faces, gives me
a strange turn. It sweeps away for a minute or two, as it goes and
comes and returns upon itself until its sweet course is run, all the
hard and stifling web of convention and opinion that closes us in; it