he had taught
her a great deal in twenty lessons.

Although she cared so much less for Bowers than for Harsanyi, Thea was,
on the whole, happier since she had been studying with him than she had
been before. She had always told herself that she studied piano to fit
herself to be a music teacher. But she never asked herself why she was
studying voice. Her voice, more than any other part of her, had to do
with that confidence, that sense of wholeness and inner well-being that
she had felt at moments ever since she could remember.

Of this feeling Thea had never spoken to any human being until that day
when she told Harsanyi that "there had always been--something." Hitherto
she had felt but one obligation toward it--secrecy; to protect it even
from herself. She had always believed that by doing all that was
required of her by her family, her teachers, her pupils, she kept that
part of herself from being caught up in the meshes of common things. She
took it for granted that some day, when she was older, she would know a
great deal more about it. It was as if she had an appointment to meet
the rest of herself sometime, somewhere. It was moving to meet her and
she was moving to meet it. That meeting awaited her, just as surely as,
for the poor girl in the seat behind her, there awaited a hole in the
earth, already dug.

For Thea, so much had begun with a hole in the earth. Yes, she
reflected, this new part of her life had all begun that morning when she
sat on the clay bank beside Ray Kennedy, under the flickering shade of
the cottonwood tree. She remembered the way Ray had looked at her that
morning. Why had he cared so much? And Wunsch, and Dr. Archie, and
Spanish Johnny, why had they? It was something that had to do with her
that made them care, but it was not she. It was something they believed
in, but it was not she. Perhaps each of them concealed another person in
himself, just as she did. Why was it that they seemed to feel and to
hunt for a second person in her and not in each other? Thea frowned up
at the dull lamp in the roof of the car. What if one's second self could
somehow speak to all these second selves? What if one could bring them
out, as whiskey did Spanish Johnny's? How deep they lay, these second
persons, and how little one knew about them, except to guard them
fiercely. It was to music, more than to anything else, that these hidden
things in people responded. Her mother--even her mother had something o