After that less serious affairs held the rooms; an eminent actor was pleased to parody another eminent actor who was also present.  This led to a scene in which each caricatured the other, and a French poet did gymnastic feats on the floor and upset a tray of soda-water, and a German conductor fluffed out his hair and died like Marguerite.  And when in the earlier hours of the morning part of the guests had gone away, and part were broiling ham in the kitchen, Sylvia sang again, quite seriously, and Michael, in Hermann’s absence, volunteered to play her accompaniment for her.  She stood behind him, and by a finger on his shoulder directed him in the way she would have him go.  Michael found himself suddenly and inexplicably understanding this; her finger, by its pressure or its light tapping, seemed to him to speak in a language that he found himself familiar with, and he slowed down stroking the notes, or quickened with staccato touch, as she wordlessly directed him.

Out of all these things, which were but trivialities, pleasant, unthinking hours for all else concerned, several points stood out for Michael, points new and illuminating.  The first was the simplicity of it all, the spontaneousness with which pleasure was born if only you took off your clothes, so to speak, and left them on the bank while you jumped in.  All his life he had buttoned his jacket and crammed his hat on to his head.  The second was the sense, indefinable but certain, that Hermann and Sylvia between them were the high priests of this memorable orgie.

He himself had met, at dreadful, solemn evenings when Lady Ashbridge and his father stood at the head of the stairs, the two eminent actors who had romped to-night, and found them exceedingly stately personages, just as no doubt they had found him an icy and awkward young man.  But they, like him, had taken their note on those different occasions from their environment.  Perhaps if his father and mother came here . . . but Michael’s imagination quailed before such a supposition.

The third point, which gradually through these weeks began to haunt him more and more, was the personality of Sylvia.  He had never come across a girl who in the least resembled her, probably because he had not attempted even to find in a girl, or to display in himself, the signals, winked across from one to the other, of human companionship.  Always he had found a difficulty in talking to a girl, because he had, in his self-consciousness, thought about what he should say.  There had been the cabalistic question of sex ever in front of him, a thing that troubled and deterred him.  But Sylvia, with her hand on his shoulder, absorbed in her singing, and directing him only as she would have pressed the pedal of the piano if she had been playing to herself, was no more agitating than if she had been a man; she was just singing, just using him to help her singing.  And even while Michael registered to himself this charming