d hear her was
worth cold and weariness and hunger. Not only was she the most famous of
living pianists but one of the most beautiful of women; and upon this
restoring fact many of the most weary stayed themselves, returning again
and again to gaze at the pictured face that adorned the outer cover of
the programme.

Illuminated by chill gas-jets, armed with books and sandwiches, the
serried and devoted ranks were composed of typical concert-goers, of
types, in some cases, becoming as extinct as the muffin-man; young
art-students from the suburbs, dressed in Liberty serges and velveteens,
and reading ninepenny editions of Browning and Rossetti--though a few,
already, were reading Yeats; middle-aged spinsters from Bayswater or
South Kensington, who took their weekly concert as they took their daily
bath; many earnest young men, soft-hatted and long-haired, studying
scores; the usual contingent of the fashionable and economical lady; and
the pale-faced business man, bringing an air of duty to the pursuit of
pleasure.

Some time before the doors opened a growing urgency began to make itself
felt. People got up from their insecurely balanced camp-stools or rose
stiffly from the stone steps to turn and stand shoulder to shoulder,
subtly transformed from comrades in discomfort to combatants for a
hazardous reward. The field for personal endeavour was small; the stairs
were narrow and their occupants packed like sardines; yet everybody
hoped to get a better seat than their positions entitled them to hope
for. Hope and fear increased in intensity with the distance from the
doors, those mute, mystic doors behind which had not yet been heard a
chink or a shuffle and against which leaned, now balefully visible, the
earliest comers of all, jaded, pallid, but insufferably assured. The
summons came at length in the sound of drawn bolts and chains and a
peremptory official voice, blood-tingling as a trumpet-call; and the
crowd, shoulder to shoulder and foot to foot, with rigid lips and eyes
uplifted, began to mount like one man. Step by step they went, steady
and wary, each pressing upon those who went before and presenting a
resistant back to those who followed after. The close, emulous contacts
bred stealthy strifes and hatreds. A small lady, with short grey hair
and thin red face and the conscienceless, smiling eye of a hypnotized
creature, drove her way along the wall and mounted with the agility of a
lizard to a place several st