And then there was yet a further consolation.

For the gloves had also a subtle effect on Lancelot.  They gave him a sense of responsibility.  Vaguely resentful as he felt against Mary Ann (in the intervals of his more definite resentment against publishers), he also felt that he could not stop at the gloves.  He had started refining her, and he must go on till she was, so to speak, all gloves.  He must cover up her coarse speech, as he had covered up her coarse hands.  He owed that to the gloves; it was the least he could do for them.  So, whenever Mary Ann made a mistake, Lancelot corrected her.  He found these grammatical dialogues not uninteresting, and a vent for his ill-humour against publishers to boot.  Very often his verbal corrections sounded astonishingly like reprimands.  Here, again, Mary Ann was forearmed by her feeling that she deserved them.  She would have been proud had she known how much Mr. Lancelot was satisfied with her aspirates, which came quite natural.  She had only dropped her “h’s” temporarily, as one drops country friends in coming to London.  Curiously enough, Mary Ann did not regard the new locutions and pronunciations as superseding the old.  They were a new language; she knew two others, her mother-tongue and her missus’s tongue.  She would as little have thought of using her new linguistic acquirements in the kitchen as of wearing her gloves there.  They were for Lancelot’s ears only, as her gloves were for his eyes.

All this time Lancelot was displaying prodigious musical activity, so much so that the cost of ruled paper became a consideration.  There was no form of composition he did not essay, none by which he made a shilling.  Once he felt himself the prey of a splendid inspiration, and sat up all night writing at fever pitch, surrounded with celestial harmonies, audible to him alone; the little room resounded with the thunder of a mighty orchestra, in which every instrument sang to him individually—­the piccolo, the flute, the oboes, the clarionets, filling the air with a silver spray of notes; the drums throbbing, the trumpets shrilling, the four horns pealing with long stately notes, the trombones and bassoons vibrating, the violins and violas sobbing in linked sweetness, the ’cello and the contra-bass moaning their under-chant.  And then, in the morning, when the first rough sketch was written, the glory faded.  He threw down his pen, and called himself an ass for wasting his time on what nobody would ever look at.  Then he laid his head on the table, overwrought, full of an infinite pity for himself.  A sudden longing seized him for some one to love him, to caress his hair, to smooth his hot forehead.  This mood passed too; he smoothed the slumbering Beethoven instead.  After a while he went into his bedroom, and sluiced his face and hands in ice-cold water, and rang the bell for breakfast.

There was a knock at the door in response.

“Come in!” he said gently—­his emotions had left him tired to the point of tenderness.  And then he waited a minute while Mary Ann was drawing on her gloves.