The steps and conversation passed round the corner, and Michael, stretching his bare toes on to the cool balcony, resumed his researches—­those joyful, unegoistic researches into himself.  His liberty was bound up with his music; the first gave the key to the second.  Often as he had rested, so to speak, in oases of music in London, they were but a pause from the desert of his uncongenial life into the desert again.  But now the desert was vanished, and the oasis stretched illimitable to the horizon in front of him.  That was where, for the future, his life was to be passed, not idly, sitting under trees, but in the eager pursuit of its unnumbered paths.  It was that aspect of it which, as he knew so well, his father, for instance, would never be able to understand.  To Lord Ashbridge’s mind, music was vaguely connected with white waistcoats and opera glasses and large pink carnations; he was congenitally incapable of viewing it in any other light than a diversion, something that took place between nine and eleven o’clock in the evening, and in smaller quantities at church on Sunday morning.  He would undoubtedly have said that Handel’s Messiah was the noblest example of music in the world, because of its subject; music did not exist for him as a separate, definite and infinite factor of life; and since it did not so exist for himself, he could not imagine it existing for anybody else.  That Michael correctly knew to be his father’s general demeanour towards life; he wanted everybody in their respective spheres to be like what he was in his.  They must take their part, as he undoubtedly did, in the Creation-scheme when the British aristocracy came into being.

A fresh factor had come into Michael’s conception of music during these last seven days.  He had become aware that Germany was music.  He had naturally known before that the vast proportion of music came from Germany, that almost all of that which meant “music” to him was of German origin; but that was a very different affair from the conviction now borne in on his mind that there was not only no music apart from Germany, but that there was no Germany apart from music.

But every moment he spent in this wayside puddle of a town (for so Baireuth seemed to an unbiased view), he became more and more aware that music beat in the German blood even as sport beat in the blood of his own people.  During this festival week Baireuth existed only because of that; at other times Baireuth was probably as non-existent as any dull and minor town in the English Midlands.  But, owing to the fact of music being for these weeks resident in Baireuth, the sordid little townlet became the capital of the huge, patient Empire.  It existed just now simply for that reason; to-night, with the curtain of the last act of Parsifal, it had ceased to exist again.  It was not that a patriotic desire to honour one of the national heroes in the home where he had been established by the mad genius of a Bavarian king that