they vary.

Colney helped her now and then to step the trifle beyond her stride,
but if he was humorous, she forgave; and if together they appalled the
decorous, it was great gain. Her supple person, pretty lips, the
style she had, gave a pass to the wondrous confidings, which were for
masculine ears, whatever the sex. Nataly might share in them, but women
did not lead her to expansiveness; or not the women of the contracted
class: Miss Graves, Mrs. Cormyn, and others at the Radnor Concerts. She
had a special consideration for Mademoiselle de Seilles, owing to her
exquisite French, as she said; and she may have liked it, but it was the
young Frenchwoman's air of high breeding that won her esteem. Girls were
spring frosts to her. Fronting Nesta, she put on her noted smile, or
wood-cut of a smile, with its label of indulgence; except when the girl
sang. Music she loved. She said it was the saving of poor Dudley. It
distinguished him in the group of the noble Evangelical Cantor Family;
and it gave him a subject of assured discourse in company; and oddly,
it contributed to his comelier air. Flute [This would be the German
Blockeflute or our Recorder. D.W.] in hand, his mouth at the blow-stop
was relieved of its pained updraw by the form for puffing; he preserved
a gentlemanly high figure in his exercises on the instrument, out of ken
of all likeness to the urgent insistency of Victor Radnor's punctuating
trunk of the puffing frame at almost every bar--an Apollo brilliancy in
energetic pursuit of the nymph of sweet sound. Too methodical one, too
fiery the other.

In duets of Hauptmann's, with Nesta at the piano, the contrast of dull
smoothness and overstressed significance was very noticeable beside the
fervent accuracy of her balanced fingering; and as she could also flute,
she could criticize; though latterly, the flute was boxed away from
lips that had devoted themselves wholly to song: song being one of the
damsel's present pressing ambitions. She found nothing to correct in
Mr. Sowerby, and her father was open to all the censures; but her father
could plead vitality, passion. He held his performances cheap after the
vehement display; he was a happy listener, whether to the babble of
his 'dear old Corelli,' or to the majesty of the rattling heavens and
swaying forests of Beethoven.

His air of listening was a thing to see; it had a look of disembodiment;
the sparkle conjured up from deeps, and the life in the sparkle,