curves as she breathed; the faint scent she used rose to his nostrils.  He thought, with contained rapture:  “Nothing in the world is equal to this.”  He did not care a fig for the effect of perspective drawings or the result of the competition.  Lois, her head half-turned towards him, her gaze lost in the sombre distances of the auditorium, talked in a low tone, ignoring the performance.  He gathered that the sudden departure of Irene Wheeler had unusually impressed and disconcerted and, to a certain extent, mortified the sisters, who could not explain it, and who resented the compulsion to go back to Paris at once.  And he detected in Lois, not for the first time, a grievance that Irene kept her, Lois, apart from the main current of her apparently gorgeous social career.  Obviously an evening at which the sole guests were two girls and a youth all quite unknown to newspapers could not be a major item in the life of a woman such as Irene Wheeler.  She had left them unceremoniously to themselves at the last moment, as it were permitting them to do what they liked within the limits of goodness for one night, and commanding them to return sagely home on the morrow.  A red-nosed actor, hands in pockets, waddled self-consciously on to the stage, and the packed audience, emitting murmurs of satisfaction, applauded.  Conversations were interrupted.  George, expectant, gave his attention to the show.  He knew little or nothing of musical comedy, having come under influences which had taught him to despise it.  His stepfather, for example, could be very sarcastic about musical comedy, and through both Enwright and John Orgreave George had further cultivated the habit of classical music, already acquired in boyhood at home in the Five Towns.  In the previous year, despite the calls upon his time of study for examinations, George had attended the Covent Garden performances of the Wagnerian “Ring” as he might have attended High Mass.  He knew by name a considerable percentage of the hundred odd themes in “The Ring,” and it was his boast that he could identify practically all the forty-seven themes in The Meistersingers.  He raved about Ternina in Tristan.  He had worshipped the Joachim quartet.  He was acquainted with all the popular symphonies of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Mozart, Glazounov, and Tschaikovsky.  He even frequented the Philharmonic Concerts, which were then conducted by a composer of sentimental drawing-room ballads, and though he would not class this conductor with Richter or Henry J. Wood, he yet believed that somehow, by the magic of the sacred name of the Philharmonic Society, the balladmonger in the man expired in the act of raising the baton and was replaced by a serious and sensitive artist.  He was accustomed to hear the same pieces of music again and again and again, and they were all or nearly all very fine, indisputably great.  It never occurred to him that once they had been unfamiliar and had had to fight for the notice