iveness unbalanced the solemnity of her search for truth.
Stella had gone to the piano, and someone with clumsy hair was testing
the pitch of his violin. So Michael assumed the portentous reverence of
a listening amateur and tried to suggest by his attitude that he was
beyond the range of Clarissa's conversation. He did not know who had
made the duet that was being played, nor did he greatly care, since,
aside from his own participation in what it gave of unified emotion to
the room, on its melodies he, as it were, voyaged from heart to heart of
everyone present. There had been several moments during his talk with
Clarissa when he had feared to see vanish that aureole with which he had
encircled this gathering, that halo woven by the mist of his imagination
and illuminated by the essential joy of the company. But now, when all
were fused by the power of the music in a brilliance that actually
pierced his apprehension with the sense of its positive being, Michael's
aureole gleamed with the same comparative reality. Traveling from heart
to heart, he drew from each the deepdown sweetness which justified all
that was extravagant in demeanor and dress, all that was flaunting in
voice and gesture, all that was weak in achievement and ambition. Even
Clarissa's prematurity seemed transferred from the cause to the effect
of her art, so that here and there some strain of music was strong
enough to sustain her personality up to the very point of abandon at
which her pictures aimed. As for George Ayliffe, Michael watching him
was bound to acknowledge that, seen thus in repose with all the
wandering weaknesses of his countenance temporarily held in check by the
music, Stella's affection for him was just intelligible. He might be
said to possess now at least some of the graceful melancholy of a
pierrot, and suddenly Michael divined that Ayliffe was much more in love
with Stella than she was or ever could be in love with him. He realized
that Ayliffe, with fixed eyes sitting back and absorbing her music, was
aware of the hopelessness of his desire, aware it must be for ever
impossible for Stella to love him, as impossible as it was for him to
paint a great portrait of her. Michael was sorry for Ayliffe because he
knew that those anxious and hungry eyes of his were losing her
continually even now in complexities that could never by him be
unraveled, in depths that could never be plumbed.

More suggestive, however, than the individual li