l opera-glasses, chocolates, and flowers on
the crimson ledge. He was very close to the powerfully built and yet
plastic Lois. He could watch her changing curves as she breathed; the
faint scent she used rose to his nostrils. He thought, with contained
rapture: "Nothing in the world is equal to this." He did not care a fig
for the effect of perspective drawings or the result of the competition.
Lois, her head half-turned towards him, her gaze lost in the sombre
distances of the auditorium, talked in a low tone, ignoring the
performance. He gathered that the sudden departure of Irene Wheeler had
unusually impressed and disconcerted and, to a certain extent, mortified
the sisters, who could not explain it, and who resented the compulsion
to go back to Paris at once. And he detected in Lois, not for the first
time, a grievance that Irene kept her, Lois, apart from the main current
of her apparently gorgeous social career. Obviously an evening at which
the sole guests were two girls and a youth all quite unknown to
newspapers could not be a major item in the life of a woman such as
Irene Wheeler. She had left them unceremoniously to themselves at the
last moment, as it were permitting them to do what they liked within the
limits of goodness for one night, and commanding them to return sagely
home on the morrow. A red-nosed actor, hands in pockets, waddled
self-consciously on to the stage, and the packed audience, emitting
murmurs of satisfaction, applauded. Conversations were interrupted.
George, expectant, gave his attention to the show. He knew little or
nothing of musical comedy, having come under influences which had taught
him to despise it. His stepfather, for example, could be very sarcastic
about musical comedy, and through both Enwright and John Orgreave George
had further cultivated the habit of classical music, already acquired in
boyhood at home in the Five Towns. In the previous year, despite the
calls upon his time of study for examinations, George had attended the
Covent Garden performances of the Wagnerian "Ring" as he might have
attended High Mass. He knew by name a considerable percentage of the
hundred odd themes in "The Ring," and it was his boast that he could
identify practically all the forty-seven themes in _The Meistersingers_.
He raved about Ternina in _Tristan_. He had worshipped the Joachim
quartet. He was acquainted with all the popular symphonies of Beethoven,
Schubert, Schumann, Mozart, Glazouno