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The Parts Men Play by Arthur Beverley Baxter
page 57 of 417 (13%)
people--you seek only to satirise, caricature, or damn altogether. If
I believe my ears, there is nothing but stupidity and insularity in
England. If I listen to my senses, to my subconscious mind, I feel
that a great crisis would reveal that she is still the bed-rock of
civilisation.'

Madame Carlotti raised her glass.

'To America's next ambassador to England!' she cried.


III.

The momentous evening was drawing to a close.

Rain, in fitful gusts, had been besieging the windows, driven by an
ill-tempered wind that blustered around the streets, darting up dark
alleys, startling the sparks emerging from chimney-pots, roaring across
the parks, slamming doors, and venting itself, every now and then, in
an ill-natured howl.

Inside the refuge of No. 8 Chelmsford Gardens a fire threw its merry
warmth over the large music-room, and did its best to offset the
tearful misery of the November night.

Conversation had dwindled in energy with the closing hour of the
affair, and seizing an auspicious moment, Norton Pyford had reached the
piano, and for twenty minutes demonstrated the close relation of the
chord of C Minor to the colour brown. Modernist music, acting on
unusual souls as classical music on ordinary souls, stimulated the
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