foreigners of the party spoke with various accents, but glibly enough;
only now and then did one of them spring over to his mother-tongue, to
fetch a racy idiom or point a joke.

Not having heard a note of Schilsky's playing, Maurice did not trust
himself to say much, and so was free to observe his right-hand
neighbour, a young man who had entered late, and taken a vacant chair
beside him. To the others present, the new-comer paid no heed, to
Maurice he murmured an absent greeting, and then, having called for
beer and emptied his glass at a draught, he appeared mentally to
return whence he had come, or to engage without delay in some urgent
train of thought. His movements were noiseless, but startlingly
abrupt. Thus, after sitting quiet for a time, his head in his hands,
he flung back in his seat with a sort of wildness, and began to stare
fixedly at the ceiling. His face was one of those, which, as by a
mystery, preserve the innocent beauty of their childhood, long after
childhood is a thing of the past: delicate as the rosy lining of a
great sea-shell was the colour that spread from below the forked blue
veins of the temples, and it paled and came again as readily as a
girl's. Girlish, too, were the limpid eyes, which, but for a trick of
dropping unexpectedly, seemed always to be gazing, in thoughtful
surprise, at something that was visible to them alone. As to the
small, frail body, it existed only for sake of the hands: narrow
hands, with long, fleshless fingers, nervous hands, that were never
still.

All at once, in a momentary lull, he leant towards Maurice, and,
without even looking up, asked the latter if he could recall the
opening bars of the prelude to TRISTAN UND ISOLDE. If so, there was a
certain point he would like to lay before him.