iano pieces that were not half so hummable as those which Michael had
already learned to play in violent allegretto. Stella would sit upright
in her starchiest frock and widest sash and play without any music a
long and boring noise that made Michael feel very fidgety. He would
endure it for a while and then he would have to go out of the room. The
first time he had done this he had expected somehow that people would
run after him to bring him back. But nobody moved. Everyone was intent
upon Stella and her noise. They were all grunting and clearing their
throats and making unintelligible exclamations. Michael was glad that
they had begun to build houses in the waste ground opposite. It was
better to watch men climbing up ladders and walking over planks and
messing with lumps of mortar than to sit there among those guttural men
in an atmosphere of Stella worship. He felt sometimes that he would like
to pinch Stella's legs--they looked so sleek and well-behaved, as she
sat there playing the piano. Michael was never invited to play on the
drawing-room piano. He was only allowed to play up in the day-nursery,
with merely the ambition of one day being able to reach the pedals to
stir him on.

"Ach, Mrs. Vane," he heard these long-haired men declare. "Your daughter
is wonderful. Ach! Ach! Ach! She is a genius. She will be the great
bianist of the new generation. Ach! Ach! Ach!"

Michael began to feel that his love for his mother or her love for him
did not matter. He began to feel that only what he himself thought and
wanted did matter; and when she went away again he was sorry, but not so
sorry as he used to be. One of these long-haired men now began to come
every day to give Stella lessons on the drawing-room piano. He would
give a very loud knock and hang up a wide-brimmed black hat in the hall
and clear his throat and button up his coat very tightly and march into
the drawing-room to wait for Stella to be brought down. Stella would
come down the stairs with her grey eyes shining and her hair all fuzzy
and her hands smelling of pink soap, while Nurse would blow very
importantly and tell Michael not to peep round corners. Stella's music
lessons were much grander than Michael's in the stuffy back-room of Miss
Marrow's. Besides, Michael's music lessons were now particularly
unpleasant, because Miss Hunt, his mistress, had grown two warts on her
first finger during the summer holidays, which made him feel sick during
their et