The first item after the true interval was the Chaconne of Bach, which Musa had played upon a memorable occasion in Frinton.  He stood upon the platform utterly alone, against a background of empty chairs, double-basses and drums.  He seemed to be unfriended and forlorn.  It appeared to Audrey that he was playing with despair.  She wished, as she looked from Musa to the deserted places in the body of the hall, that the piece was over, and that the entire concert was over.  How could anyone enjoy such an arid maze of sounds?  The whole theory of classical composition and its vogue was hollow and ridiculous.  People did not like the classics; they could not and they never would.  Now a waltz ... after a jolly dinner and wine! ...  But the Chaconne!  But Bach!  But culture!  The audience was visibly and audibly restless.  For about two hundred years the attempt to force this Chaconne upon the public had been continuous, and it was still boring them.  Of course it was!  The thing was unnatural.

And she herself was a fool; she was a ninny.  And the alleged power of money was an immense fraud.  She had thought to perform miracles by means of a banking account.  For a moment she had imagined that the miracles had come to pass.  But they had not come to pass.  The public was too old, too tired, and too wary.  It could not thus be tricked into making a reputation.  The forces that made reputations were far less amenable than she had fancied.  The world was too clever and too experienced for her ingenuous self.  Geniuses were not lying about and waiting to be picked up.  Musa was not a genius.  She had been a simpleton, and the sacred Quarter had been a simpleton.  She was rather angry with Musa for not being a genius.  And the confidence which he had displayed a few hours earlier was just grotesque conceit!  And men and women who were supposed to be friendly human hearts were not so in truth.  They were merely indifferent and callous spectators.  The Foas, for example, were chattering in their box, apparently oblivious of the tragedy that was enacting under their eyes.  But then, it was perhaps not a tragedy; it was perhaps a farce.

And what would these self-absorbed spectators of existence say and do, if and when it was known that she was no longer a young woman of enormous wealth?  Would Dauphin have sought to compel her to enter his studio had he been aware that her fortune had gone tip in smoke?  She was not in a real world.  She was in a world of shams.  And she was a sham in the world of shams.  She wanted to be back again in the honest realities of Moze, where in the churchyard she could see the tombs of her great-great-grandfathers.  Only one extraneous interest drew her thoughts away from Moze.  That interest was Mr. Gilman.  Mr. Gilman was her conquest and her slave.  She adored him because he was so wistful and so reliable and so adoring.  Mr. Gilman sat intent and straight upright in Madame Piriac’s box and behaved just as though Bach himself was present.  He understood nothing of Bach, but he could be trusted to behave with benevolence.