finished she gave a sigh of appreciation,
having forgotten, it seemed, that persons who had come to admire
Glazounov ought not to relish Elgar. And George, too, reflecting upon
the sensations produced within him by Elgar, was ready to admit that,
though Elgar could of course not be classed with the foreigner, there
might be something to be said for him after all.

"This is just what I needed," she murmured.

"Oh?"

"I was very depressed this afternoon," she said.

"Were you?" He had not noticed it.

"Yes. They've cut down my price from a pound to seventeen and six."
'They' were the employing bookbinders, and the price was the fixed price
for a design--side and back.

He was shocked, and he felt guilty. How was it that he had noticed
nothing in her demeanour? He had been full of the misfortune of the
firm, and she had made the misfortune her own, keeping silence about the
grinding harshness of bookbinders. He was an insensible egotist, and
girls were wondrous. At any rate this girl was wondrous. He had an
intense desire to atone for his insensibility and his egotism by
protecting her, spoiling her, soothing her into forgetfulness of her
trouble.... Ah! He understood now what she meant when she had replied to
his suggestion as to visiting the cathedral: "It might do me good."

"How rotten!" he exclaimed, expressing his sympathy by means of disgust.
"Couldn't you tell them to go to the dickens?"

"You have to take what they'll give," she answered. "Especially when
they begin to talk about bad trade and that sort of thing."

"Well, it's absolutely rotten!"

It was not the arbitrary reduction of her earnings that he resented, but
the fact of her victimhood. Scandalous, infamous, that this rare and
delicate creature should be defenceless against commercial brutes!

The Glazounov ballet music, "The Seasons," started. Knowing himself
justified, he surrendered himself to it, to its exoticism, to its
Russianism, to its wilful and disconcerting beauty. And there was no
composer like Glazounov. Beneath the sensory spell of the music, his
memory wandered about through the whole of his life. He recalled days in
his mother's boarding-house at Brighton; musical evenings, at which John
Orgreave was present, at his stepfather's house in the Five Towns; and
in all kinds of scenes at the later home at Ladderedge Hall--scenes in
which his mother again predominated, becoming young again and learning
sports and horsewomanship as