ING-ROOM.
OP. 999. BACK IN THAT OLD GARDEN AGAIN, AND HOW GERRY COULD NOT SWIM.
THE OLD TARTINI SONATA

As soon as ever Mr. Bradshaw touched his violin, and before ever he
began to play his Hungarian Dance on all four strings at once, Mrs.
Nightingale and Mr. Fenwick went away into the back drawing-room, not
to be too near the music. Because there was a fire in both rooms.

In the interval of time that had passed since Christmas Sally had
contrived to "dismiss from her mind" Colonel Lund's previsions about
her mother and Mr. Fenwick. Or they had given warning, and gone of
their own accord. For by now she had again fallen into the frame of
mind which classified her mother and Fenwick as semi-elderly people,
and, so to speak, out of it all. So her mind assented readily to
distance from the music as a sufficient reason for a secession to the
back room. Non-combatants are just as well off the field of battle.

But a closer observer than Sally at this moment would have noticed
that chat in an undertone had already set in in the back drawing-room
even before the Hungarians had stopped dancing. Also that the applause
that came therefrom, when they did stop, had a certain perfunctory
air, as of plaudits something else makes room for, and comes back
again after. Not that she would have "seen anything in it" if she had,
because, whatever her mother said or did was, in Sally's eyes, right
and normal. Abnormal and bad things were conceived and executed
outside the family. Nor, in spite of the _sotto voce_, was there
anything Sally could not have participated in, whatever exception she
might have taken to something of a patronising tone, inexcusable
towards our own generation even in the most semi-elderly people on
record.

Her mother, at Sally's latest observation point, had taken the large
armchair quite on the other side of the rug, to be as far off the
music as possible. Mr. Fenwick, in reply to a flying remark of her
own, she being at the moment a music-book seeker, wouldn't bring the
other large armchair in front of the fire and be comfortable, thank
you. He liked this just as well. Sally had then commented on Mr.
Fenwick's unnatural love of uncomfortable chairs "when he wasn't
walking about the room." She fancied, as she passed on, that she heard
her mother address him as "Fenwick," without the "Mr." So she did.

"You are a restless man, Fenwick! I wonder were you so before the
accident? Oh dear! there I am on tha