“My niece does,” said Helen, laying her hand on Rachel’s shoulder.

“Oh, how I envy you!” Clarissa addressed Rachel for the first time.  “D’you remember this?  Isn’t it divine?” She played a bar or two with ringed fingers upon the page.

“And then Tristan goes like this, and Isolde—­oh!—­it’s all too thrilling!  Have you been to Bayreuth?”

“No, I haven’t,” said Rachel. `"Then that’s still to come.  I shall never forget my first Parsifal—­a grilling August day, and those fat old German women, come in their stuffy high frocks, and then the dark theatre, and the music beginning, and one couldn’t help sobbing.  A kind man went and fetched me water, I remember; and I could only cry on his shoulder!  It caught me here” (she touched her throat).  “It’s like nothing else in the world!  But where’s your piano?” “It’s in another room,” Rachel explained.

“But you will play to us?” Clarissa entreated.  “I can’t imagine anything nicer than to sit out in the moonlight and listen to music—­only that sounds too like a schoolgirl!  You know,” she said, turning to Helen, “I don’t think music’s altogether good for people—­I’m afraid not.”

“Too great a strain?” asked Helen.

“Too emotional, somehow,” said Clarissa.  “One notices it at once when a boy or girl takes up music as a profession.  Sir William Broadley told me just the same thing.  Don’t you hate the kind of attitudes people go into over Wagner—­like this—­” She cast her eyes to the ceiling, clasped her hands, and assumed a look of intensity.  “It really doesn’t mean that they appreciate him; in fact, I always think it’s the other way round.  The people who really care about an art are always the least affected.  D’you know Henry Philips, the painter?” she asked.

“I have seen him,” said Helen.

“To look at, one might think he was a successful stockbroker, and not one of the greatest painters of the age.  That’s what I like.”

“There are a great many successful stockbrokers, if you like looking at them,” said Helen.

Rachel wished vehemently that her aunt would not be so perverse.

“When you see a musician with long hair, don’t you know instinctively that he’s bad?” Clarissa asked, turning to Rachel.  “Watts and Joachim—­they looked just like you and me.”

“And how much nicer they’d have looked with curls!” said Helen.  “The question is, are you going to aim at beauty or are you not?”

“Cleanliness!” said Clarissa, “I do want a man to look clean!”

“By cleanliness you really mean well-cut clothes,” said Helen.

“There’s something one knows a gentleman by,” said Clarissa, “but one can’t say what it is.”

“Take my husband now, does he look like a gentleman?”

The question seemed to Clarissa in extraordinarily bad taste.  “One of the things that can’t be said,” she would have put it.  She could find no answer, but a laugh.