Dreams was the first of the five, but the music that haunted belonged to the third song.  She could not quite remember a single phrase, nor any words except “pining flowers.”  She had thought of sending for it, but such vague memory suited her mood better than an exact text.  If she had the song she would go to the piano, and she did not wish to move from the Sheraton sofa, made comfortable with pale blue cushions.  But again the music stirred her memory like wind the tall grasses, and out of the slowly-moving harmonies there arose an invocation of the strange pathos of existence; no plaint for an accidental sorrow, something that happened to you or me, or might have happened, if our circumstances had been different; only the mood of desolate self-consciousness in which the soul slowly contemplates the disaster of existence.  The melancholy that the music exhales is no querulous feminine plaint, but an immemorial melancholy, an exalted resignation.  The music goes out like a fume, dying in remote chords, and Evelyn sat absorbed, viewing the world from afar, like the Lady of Shallott, seeing in the mirror of memory the chestnut trees of the Dulwich street, and a little girl running after her hoop; and then her mother’s singing classes, and the expectation she had lived in of learning to sing, and being brought upon the stage by her mother.  If her mother had lived, she would have been singing “Romeo and Juliet” and “Lucia.” ...  Her father would have deemed her voice wasted; but mother always had had her way with father.  Then she saw herself pining for Owen, sick of love, longing, hungry, weak, weary, disappointed, hopeless.  Her thoughts turned from that past, and her mother’s face looked out of her reverie, grey and grave and watchful, only half seen in the shadows.  She seemed aware of her mother as she might be of some idea, strangely personal to herself, something near and remote, beyond this span of life, stretching into infinity.  She seemed to feel herself lifted a little above the verge of life, so that she might inquire the truth from her mother; but something seemed to hold her back, and she did not dare to hear the supernatural truth.  She was still too thrall to this life of lies, but she could not but see her mother’s face, and what surprised her was that this grey shadow was more real to her than the rest of the world.  The face did not stir, it always wore the same expression.  Evelyn could not even tell if the expression of the dim eyes was one of disapproval.  But it needs must be—­she could have no doubt on that point.  What was certain and sure was that she seemed in a nearer and more intimate, in a more essential communication with her mother, than with her father who was alive.  Nothing seemed to divide her from her mother; she had only to let her soul go, and it could mingle with her mother’s spirit, and then all misunderstandings would be at an end.