“There’s a good deal of bare-faced iniquity riding around prosperously in high-powered cars,” said Mr. Welles, with a lively accent of bitterness.  “You have to get used to it in business life.  It’s very likely that your wicked Mr. Lowder in private life in New Hampshire is a good husband and father, and contributes to all the charitable organizations.”

“I won’t change my conception of him as a pasty-faced demon,” insisted Marise.

It appeared that Mr. Marsh’s appetite for local history was so slight as to be cloyed even by the very much abbreviated account she had given them, for he now said, hiding a small yawn, with no effort to conceal the fact that he had been bored, “Mrs. Crittenden, I’ve heard from Mr. Welles’ house the most tantalizing snatches from your piano.  Won’t you, now we’re close to it, put the final touch to our delightful lunch-party by letting us hear it?”

Marise was annoyed by his grand seigneur air of certainty of his own 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 Pathetique.  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, rich with a thousand clustered nameless associations, something that thrilled and sang and lived a full harmonious life of its own.  That first pearling down-dropping arabesque of treble notes, not only her fingers played those, but every fiber in her, answering like the vibrating wood of a violin, its very cells rearranged in the pattern which the notes had so many times called into existence . . . by the time she had finished she had almost forgotten that she had listeners.