w she could play, at least.

She laid her hands on the keys; and across those little smarting,
trivial personalities there struck the clear, assured dignity and worth
of her old friend . . . was there ever such a friend as that rough old
German who had died so long before she was born? No one could say the
human race was ignoble or had never deserved to live, who knew his
voice. In a moment she was herself again.

Those well-remembered opening chords, they were by this time not merely
musical sounds. They had become something within her, of her own being,
rich with a thousand clustered nameless associations, something that
thrilled and sang and lived a full harmonious life of its own. That
first pearling down-dropping arabesque of treble notes, not only her
fingers played those, but every fiber in her, answering like the
vibrating wood of a violin, its very cells rearranged in the pattern
which the notes had so many times called into existence . . . by the time
she had finished she had almost forgotten that she had listeners.

And when, sitting for a moment, coming back slowly from Beethoven's
existence to her own, she heard no sound or stir from the porch, she
had only a quiet smile of tolerant amusement. Apparently she had not
guessed right as to their tastes. Or perhaps she had played them to
sleep.

As for herself, she was hungry for more; she reached out her hand
towards that world of high, purified beauty which miraculously was
always there, with open doors of gold and ivory. . . .

What now? What did she know by heart? The Largo in the Chopin Sonata.
That would do to come after Beethoven.

The first plunge into this did not so intimately startle and stir her as
the Beethoven movement had done. It was always like that, she thought as
she played, the sound of the first note, the first chord struck when one
had not played for a day or so; it was having one's closed eyes unsealed
to the daylight anew, an incredulous rapture. But after that, though you
didn't go on quaking and bowing your head, though you were no longer
surprised to find music still there, better than you could possibly
remember it, though you took it for granted, how deeply and solidly and
steadfastly you lived in it and on it! It made you like the child in the
Wordsworth sonnet, "A beauteous evening, calm and free"; it took you in
to worship quite simply and naturally at the Temple's inner shrine; and
you adored none the less although you were