In duets of Hauptmann’s, with Nesta at the piano, the contrast of dull smoothness and overstressed significance was very noticeable beside the fervent accuracy of her balanced fingering; and as she could also flute, she could criticize; though latterly, the flute was boxed away from lips that had devoted themselves wholly to song:  song being one of the damsel’s present pressing ambitions.  She found nothing to correct in Mr. Sowerby, and her father was open to all the censures; but her father could plead vitality, passion.  He held his performances cheap after the vehement display; he was a happy listener, whether to the babble of his ‘dear old Corelli,’ or to the majesty of the rattling heavens and swaying forests of Beethoven.

His air of listening was a thing to see; it had a look of disembodiment; the sparkle conjured up from deeps, and the life in the sparkle, as of a soul at holiday.  Eyes had been given this man to spy the pleasures and reveal the joy of his pasture on them:  gateways to the sunny within, issues to all the outer Edens.  Few of us possess that double significance of the pure sparkle.  It captivated Lady Grace.  She said a word of it to Fenellan:  ‘There is a man who can feel rapture!’ He had not to follow the line of her sight:  she said so on a previous evening, in a similar tone; and for a woman to repeat herself, using the very emphasis, was quaint.  She could feel rapture; but her features and limbs were in motion to designate it, between simply and wilfully; she had the instinct to be dimpling, and would not for a moment control it, and delighted in its effectiveness:  only when observing that winged sparkle of eyes did an idea of envy, hardly a consciousness, inform her of being surpassed; and it might be in the capacity to feel besides the gift to express.  Such a reflection relating to a man, will make women mortally sensible that they are the feminine of him.

‘His girl has the look,’ Fenellan said in answer.

She cast a glance at Nesta, then at Nataly.

And it was true, that the figure of a mother, not pretending to the father’s vividness, eclipsed it somewhat in their child.  The mother gave richness of tones, hues and voice, and stature likewise, and the thick brown locks, which in her own were threads of gold along the brush from the temples:  she gave the girl a certain degree of the composure of manner which Victor could not have bestowed; she gave nothing to clash with his genial temper; she might be supposed to have given various qualities, moral if you like.  But vividness was Lady Grace’s admirable meteor of the hour:  she was unable to perceive, so as to compute, the value of obscurer lights.  Under the charm of Nataly’s rich contralto during a duet with Priscilla Graves, she gesticulated ecstasies, and uttered them, and genuinely; and still, when reduced to meditations, they would have had no weight, they would hardly have seemed an apology for language, beside Victor’s gaze of pleasure in the noble forthroll of the notes.