ted him in the way she would have him go. Michael found
himself suddenly and inexplicably understanding this; her finger, by its
pressure or its light tapping, seemed to him to speak in a language that
he found himself familiar with, and he slowed down stroking the notes,
or quickened with staccato touch, as she wordlessly directed him.

Out of all these things, which were but trivialities, pleasant,
unthinking hours for all else concerned, several points stood out for
Michael, points new and illuminating. The first was the simplicity of it
all, the spontaneousness with which pleasure was born if only you took
off your clothes, so to speak, and left them on the bank while you
jumped in. All his life he had buttoned his jacket and crammed his hat
on to his head. The second was the sense, indefinable but certain, that
Hermann and Sylvia between them were the high priests of this memorable
orgie.

He himself had met, at dreadful, solemn evenings when Lady Ashbridge and
his father stood at the head of the stairs, the two eminent actors who
had romped to-night, and found them exceedingly stately personages, just
as no doubt they had found him an icy and awkward young man. But they,
like him, had taken their note on those different occasions from their
environment. Perhaps if his father and mother came here . . . but
Michael's imagination quailed before such a supposition.

The third point, which gradually through these weeks began to haunt him
more and more, was the personality of Sylvia. He had never come across
a girl who in the least resembled her, probably because he had not
attempted even to find in a girl, or to display in himself, the signals,
winked across from one to the other, of human companionship. Always
he had found a difficulty in talking to a girl, because he had, in his
self-consciousness, thought about what he should say. There had been the
cabalistic question of sex ever in front of him, a thing that troubled
and deterred him. But Sylvia, with her hand on his shoulder, absorbed in
her singing, and directing him only as she would have pressed the pedal
of the piano if she had been playing to herself, was no more agitating
than if she had been a man; she was just singing, just using him to help
her singing. And even while Michael registered to himself this charming
annihilation of sex, which allowed her to be to him no more than her
brother was--less, in fact, but on the same plane--she had come to
the end