Through an arched doorway could be seen the orchestra and half the auditorium.

“This is the best seat in the hall,” George observed proudly.  Marguerite smiled at him.

When the “Sea-Pictures” were finished she gave a sigh of appreciation, having forgotten, it seemed, that persons who had come to admire Glazounov ought not to relish Elgar.  And George, too, reflecting upon the sensations produced within him by Elgar, was ready to admit that, though Elgar could of course not be classed with the foreigner, there might be something to be said for him after all.

“This is just what I needed,” she murmured.

“Oh?”

“I was very depressed this afternoon,” she said.

“Were you?” He had not noticed it.

“Yes.  They’ve cut down my price from a pound to seventeen and six.”  ‘They’ were the employing bookbinders, and the price was the fixed price for a design—­side and back.

He was shocked, and he felt guilty.  How was it that he had noticed nothing in her demeanour?  He had been full of the misfortune of the firm, and she had made the misfortune her own, keeping silence about the grinding harshness of bookbinders.  He was an insensible egotist, and girls were wondrous.  At any rate this girl was wondrous.  He had an intense desire to atone for his insensibility and his egotism by protecting her, spoiling her, soothing her into forgetfulness of her trouble....  Ah!  He understood now what she meant when she had replied to his suggestion as to visiting the cathedral:  “It might do me good.”

“How rotten!” he exclaimed, expressing his sympathy by means of disgust.  “Couldn’t you tell them to go to the dickens?”

“You have to take what they’ll give,” she answered.  “Especially when they begin to talk about bad trade and that sort of thing.”

“Well, it’s absolutely rotten!”

It was not the arbitrary reduction of her earnings that he resented, but the fact of her victimhood.  Scandalous, infamous, that this rare and delicate creature should be defenceless against commercial brutes!

The Glazounov ballet music, “The Seasons,” started.  Knowing himself justified, he surrendered himself to it, to its exoticism, to its Russianism, to its wilful and disconcerting beauty.  And there was no composer like Glazounov.  Beneath the sensory spell of the music, his memory wandered about through the whole of his life.  He recalled days in his mother’s boarding-house at Brighton; musical evenings, at which John Orgreave was present, at his stepfather’s house in the Five Towns; and in all kinds of scenes at the later home at Ladderedge Hall—­scenes in which his mother again predominated, becoming young again and learning sports and horsewomanship as a girl might have learnt them....  And they were all beautiful beneath the music.  The music softened; the fountain was heard; the striking of matches was heard....  Still, all was beautiful.