roar of
motor-buses just beyond the palisades. And Miss Ingate in the exciting
sunshine gazed around with her subdued Essex grin, as if saying: "It's the
most topsy-turvy planet that I was ever on, and why am I, of all people,
trying to make this canvas look like a piece of sculpture and a street?"

"Now, Miss Ingate," said tall red-haired Tommy, who was standing over her.
"Before you go any farther, do look at the line of roofs and see how
interesting it is; it's really full of interest. And you've simply not got
on speaking terms with it yet."

"No more I have! No more I have!" cried Miss Ingate, glancing round at
Audrey, who was swinging her racket. "Thank you, Tommy. I ought to have
thought of it for my own sake, because roofs are so much easier than
statues, and I must get an effect somewhere, mustn't I?"

Tommy winked at Audrey. But Tommy's wink was as naught to the great
invisible wink of Miss Ingate, the everlasting wink that derided the
universe and the sun himself.

Then Musa appeared, with paraphernalia, at the end of a path. Accompanying
him was a specimen of the creature known on tennis lawns as "a fourth." He
was almost nameless, tall, very young, with the seedlings of a moustache
and a space of nude calf between his knickerbockers and his socks. He was
very ceremonious, shy, ungainly and blushful. He played a fair-to-middling
game; and nothing more need be said of him.

Musa by contrast was an accomplished man of the world, and the fact that
the fourth obviously regarded him as a hero helped Musa to behave in a
manner satisfactory to himself in front of these English and American
women, so strange, so exotic, so kind, and so disconcerting. Musa looked
upon Britain as a romantic isle where people died for love. And as for
America, in his mind it was as sinister, as wondrous, and as fatal as the
Indies might seem to a bank clerk in Bradford. He had need of every moral
assistance in this or any other social ordeal. For, though he was still the
greatest violinist in Paris, and perhaps in the world, he could not yet
prove this profound truth by the only demonstration which the world
accepts.

If he played in studios he was idolised. If he played at small concerts in
unknown halls he was received with rapture. But he was never lionised. The
great concert halls never saw him on their platforms; his name was never in
the newspapers; and hospitable personages never fought together for his
presence at their t