iment and some wonderful song. The Australian stood well away
from the piano, her shoulders thrown back and her eyes upon the
wall opposite her. There was no prelude. Piano and voice rang out
together--single notes which the voice took and sustained with an
expressive power which was beyond anything in Miriam's experience. Not a
note was quite true.... The unerring falseness of pitch was as startling
as the quality of the voice. The great wavering shouts slurring now
above, now below the mark amazed Miriam out of all shyness. She sat
up, frankly gazing--"How dare she? She hasn't an atom of ear--how
ghastly"--her thoughts exclaimed as the shouts went on. The longer
sustained notes presently reminded her of something. It was like
something she had heard--in the interval between the verses--while the
sounds echoed in the mind she remembered the cry, hand to mouth, of a
London dustman.

Then she lost everything in the story of the Sultan's daughter and the
young Asra, and when the fullest applause of the evening was going to
Gertrude's song, she did not withhold her share.

10

Anna, the only servant Miriam had seen so far--an enormous woman whose
face, apart from the small eyes, seemed all "bony structure," Miriam
noted in a phrase borrowed from some unremembered reading--brought in
a tray filled with cups of milk, a basket of white rolls and a pile of
little plates. Gertrude took the tray and handed it about the room. As
Miriam took her cup, chose a roll, deposited it on a plate and succeeded
in abstracting the plate from the pile neatly, without fumbling, she
felt that for the moment Gertrude was prepared to tolerate her. She did
not desire this in the least, but when the deep harsh voice fell against
her from the bending Australian, she responded to the "Wie gefallt's
Ihnen?" with an upturned smile and a warm "sehr gut!" It gratified her
to discover that she could, at the end of this one day, understand or at
the worst gather the drift of, all she heard, both of German and French
her English was all right--at least, if she chose.... Pater had always
been worrying about slang and careless pronunciation. None of them ever
said "cut in half" or "very unique" or "ho'sale" or "phodygraff." She
was awfully slangy herself--she and Harriett were, in their thoughts as
well as their words--but she had no provincialisms, no Londonisms--she
could be the purest Oxford English. There was something at any rate to
give her Ge