Though Margaret had at first revolted inwardly against the details of her professional surroundings, she had grown used to them by sure and fatal degrees, and things that would once have disgusted her were indifferent to her now.  Men who have been educated in conditions of ordinary refinement and who have volunteered in the ranks or gone to sea before the mast have experienced something very like what befell Margaret; but men are not delicately nurtured beings whose bloom is damaged by the rough air of reality, and the camp and the forecastle are not the stage.  Perhaps nothing that is necessary shocks really sensible people; it is when disagreeable things are perfectly useless and quite avoidable—­in theory—­that they are most repugnant to men like Edmund Lushington.  He had warned Margaret of what was in store for her, before she had taken the final step; but he had not warned himself that in spite of her bringing-up she might get used to it all and end by not resenting it any more than the rest of the professionals with whom she associated.  It was this that chilled him.

‘I hope I’m not interrupting your work,’ he said as he sat down.

‘My work?’

‘I heard you studying when they let me in.’

‘Oh!’

His voice sounded very indifferent, and a pause followed Margaret’s mild ejaculation.

‘It’s rather a thankless opera for the soprano, I always think,’ he observed.  ‘The tenor has it all his own way.’

‘The Elisir d’Amore?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve not rehearsed it yet,’ said Margaret rather drearily.  ’I don’t know.’

He evidently meant to talk of indifferent things again, as at their last meeting, and she felt that she was groping in the dark for something she had lost.  There was no sympathy in his voice, no interest, and she was inclined to ask him plainly what was the matter; but her pride hindered her still, and she only looked at him with an expression of inquiry.  He laid his hand on the corner of the piano, and his eyes rested on the shaded lamp as if it attracted him.  Perhaps he wondered why he had nothing to say to her, and why she was unwilling to help the conversation a little, since her new part might be supposed to furnish matter for a few commonplace phrases.  The smoky sunset was fading outside and the room was growing dark.

‘When do the rehearsals begin?’ he asked after a long interval, and as if he was quite indifferent to the answer.

‘When Stromboli comes, I suppose.’

Margaret turned on the piano stool, so as to face the desk, and she quietly closed the open score and laid it on the little table on her other side, as if not caring to talk of it any more, but she did not turn to him again.

‘You had a great success in New York,’ he said, after some time.