began the set of German songs--Brahms, Schubert, Schumann--with which
the recital opened. And for one moment, before he lost himself in the
ecstasy of hearing, Michael found himself registering the fact that
Sylvia Falbe had one of the most charming faces he had ever seen. The
next he was swallowed up in melody.

She had the ease of the consummate artist, and each note, like the gates
of the New Jerusalem, was a pearl, round and smooth and luminous almost,
so that it was as if many-coloured light came from her lips. Nor was
that all; it seemed as if the accompaniment was made by the song itself,
coming into life with the freshness of the dawn of its creation; it was
impossible to believe that one mind directed the singer and another the
pianist, and if the voice was an example of art in excelsis, not less
exalted was the perfection of the player. Not for a moment through the
song did he take his eyes off her; he looked at her with an intensity of
gaze that seemed to be reading the emotion with which the lovely melody
filled her. For herself, she looked straight out over the hall, with
grey eyes half-closed, and mouth that in the pauses of her song was
large and full-lipped, generously curving, and face that seemed lit with
the light of the morning she sang of. She was the song; Michael thought
of her as just that, and the pianist who watched and understood her so
unerringly was the song, too. They had for him no identity of their own;
they were as remote from everyday life as the mind of Schumann which
they made so vivid. It was then that they existed.

The last song of the group she sang in English, for it was "Who is
Sylvia?" There was a buzz of smiles and whispers among the front row in
the pause before it, and regaining her own identity for a moment, she
smiled at a group of her friends among whom clearly it was a cliche
species of joke that she should ask who Sylvia was, and enumerate her
merits, when all the time she was Sylvia. Michael felt rather impatient
at this; she was not anybody just now but a singer. And then came the
divine inevitable simplicity of perfect words and the melody preordained
for them. The singer, as he knew, was German, but she had no trace of
foreign accent. It seemed to him that this was just one miracle the
more; she had become English because she was singing what Shakespeare
wrote.

The next group, consisting of modern French songs, appeared to Michael
utterly unworthy of the singer