ceptance saved her some tears, though she shed others. And there
remained always the gloves. When she was putting them on she always
felt she was slipping her hands in his.

And then there was yet a further consolation. For the gloves had also
a subtle effect on Lancelot. They gave him a sense of responsibility.
Vaguely resentful as he felt against Mary Ann (in the intervals of his
more definite resentment against publishers), he also felt that he
could not stop at the gloves. He had started refining her, and he must
go on till she was, so to speak, all gloves. He must cover up her
coarse speech, as he had covered up her coarse hands. He owed that to
the gloves; it was the least he could do for them. So, whenever Mary
Ann made a mistake, Lancelot corrected her. He found these grammatical
dialogues not uninteresting, and a vent for his ill-humour against
publishers to boot. Very often his verbal corrections sounded
astonishingly like reprimands. Here, again, Mary Ann was forearmed by
her feeling that she deserved them. She would have been proud had she
known how much Mr. Lancelot was satisfied with her aspirates, which
came quite natural. She had only dropped her "h's" temporarily, as one
drops country friends in coming to London. Curiously enough, Mary Ann
did not regard the new locutions and pronunciations as superseding the
old. They were a new language; she knew two others, her mother-tongue
and her missus's tongue. She would as little have thought of using her
new linguistic acquirements in the kitchen as of wearing her gloves
there. They were for Lancelot's ears only, as her gloves were for his
eyes.

All this time Lancelot was displaying prodigious musical activity, so
much so that the cost of ruled paper became a consideration. There was
no form of composition he did not essay, none by which he made a
shilling. Once he felt himself the prey of a splendid inspiration, and
sat up all night writing at fever pitch, surrounded with celestial
harmonies, audible to him alone; the little room resounded with the
thunder of a mighty orchestra, in which every instrument sang to him
individually--the piccolo, the flute, the oboes, the clarionets,
filling the air with a silver spray of notes; the drums throbbing, the
trumpets shrilling, the four horns pealing with long, stately notes,
the trombones and bassoons vibrating, the violins and violas sobbing in
linked sweetness, the 'cello and the contra-bass mo