Monica looked up, not appearing to best advantage with her mouth full. This was one development she had not foreseen.

"I know it must seem strange to you, but I suppose you have heard about the conditions of my mother-in-law's will?"

Monica shook her head. "Not a whisper," said she.

"You must be one of the few people who hasn't heard something. But of course you've been out of the country. Still, I thought your -- some of your relatives might have written to you about it. It seems to us -- to Solly and me -- that everyone knows about it. Well, it's complicated, but it comes to this; the Trust which supports you has all Mrs Bridgetower's money for its funds. When she died, my husband was left one hundred dollars, and that was all. It was a blow; I know you'll understand that. But it wasn't as though he was free. The money may come to him; it will come to him if we have a male child. Had you not heard anything of that?"

"Nothing," said Monica, and felt suddenly cold in the warm little room.

"Yes. If we have a male child, the Trust automatically ends. But till that time all the money goes to you. We had a child, you know -- you didn't? -- well, we had a son, but he was born dead. It was a sore disappointment. Not wholly, or even mostly, because of the money but -- you do understand, don't you? We don't hold ill-will against you. After all, it might have been somebody else -- anybody with talent. But we're chained to this house, which costs a terrible lot to keep up, even when the Trust undertakes to keep it in repair. And my husband is still only a lecturer, and even with Summer School fees, and what he can get by writing now and then for the radio, and so forth, we can't keep our heads above water. We're not merely broke; we're terribly in debt. Now, of course Solly knows that the Trust has just made over $45,000 of surplus funds to you. -- I hate saying this, but under other circumstances that would have been our money. I'm asking if you could let us have ten thousand, to tide us over?"

Monica looked, but could not speak.

"You see, we have hopes. We hope for another child. But suppose it isn't a boy? Suppose there is never another boy? I don't want to let myself talk about my mother-in-law, but it's so cruel! If we could get free of the house, we might snap our fingers at the whole thing, but we can't -- at least we haven't quite gone so far as to sacrifice all hopes in order to get out of this net. And meanwhile -- you understand, don't you, that I'm talking to you as a friend, and I'm not trying to wring your heart, really I'm not -- I only want you to know how things are -- our marriage is being twisted out of shape. Solly is a drudge, and I'm a baby-factory, bound to go on and on, until we have a son. It's a horrible vengeance -- because she hated me -- because I took her son --"

Veronica was not a weeping woman, but her mute distress was more terrible to another woman than tears could be.

Oh God, -- thought Monica, if only I had enough sense not to always tell everything I know! I've told Giles I've got $45,000, or close to it, when the funeral's paid for, and that's what he'll be counting on. If I go back with less -- I couldn't explain it to him, ever. These people wouldn't be real to him. Nothing's real to him except the opera, and I'm real because I've been able to support him while he wrote it, and can help to pay to get it on.

But what can I tell Veronica? Tell her that an artistic venture demands every cent of this money, when she and her husband think of it as theirs? What could a plan like that mean to people who are in this sort of mess? Tell her my lover must have every penny I can get, like a tart giving her earnings to her pimp, for fear of a black eye? How real would Giles seem to them? What can I say?

The silence between them was more than either woman could bear, and it was Veronica who broke it.

"It would be a loan, of course, a matter of business -- we wouldn't dream of asking more than that. I mean, we'd have to arrange a rate of interest; we wouldn't expect you to lose by it."

Monica was frozen with discomfiture and pity, but she could not find anything to say. Veronica could not be silent, now; anything was better than silence. She continued: "I know, of course, that what I'm asking you to do is quite illegal. Solly has tried to get loans out of the funds from Mr Snelgrove, and it can't be done. If you let us have some money, we might all end in jail, I suppose. Or at best it would look terrible if anyone found out."

Monica had to speak.

"I wouldn't care how illegal it was, if I could help you," said she. "I just can't. There's a very good reason -- I swear to you that it's a good reason -- why I can't, but at present I'm unable to explain it. I will explain as soon as I can, and as fully as possible. But you must believe that it isn't greed, or stinginess, or because I don't admire you and your husband very much, and want you to think well of me. But I can't do it."

"I thought that would be your answer," said Veronica, without rancour; "Solly said you had spoken of a plan of some sort to the Trustees. But you see that I had to try, don't you?"

The noise of the party mounted to them, and Solly came to fetch his wife and Monica. A quick glance told him what he most wanted to know, and he did not allow his obligatory high spirits, as host, to flag. To lose all hope is, in a way, to be free, and it often brings with it a lightening of mood. Downstairs they went, into a sea of compliments, of enthusiasm, of success.

Much later, as Monica lay in her bed, she thought of the party with satisfaction, and yet somewhat remotely. It had been the occasion for an outlet of the enthusiasm which her recital had evoked, and which had not expended itself in the applause at Fallen Hall. She had done her duty. She had tried at first to bring Dad into the circle of enthusiasm; he had appreciated her solicitude, but it was doubtful if he really knew any more about the affair than that Monny had, in some mysterious way, I made a hit with these big-bugs. It was not that he was stupid; he was dim, remote and, since the death of his wife, only partly alive. Aunt Ellen was quite different; it was not at all hard to find people for her to talk to; Cobbler had been very good to her. Alex and Kevin, astonishingly assured and competent at a party far above their accustomed welkin, had been kind about looking after Dad.

For Monica had not been able to do so. Everybody wanted to talk to her. One or two had liked Kubla Khan, and said so; some had spoken very kindly about the songs sung in memory of Mrs Gall. But Water Parted seemed to have impressed everybody.

Yet what strange things they found in it! "I wish I knew what was in your mind when you sang that!" Over and over again she heard that comment, differently phrased. Many, as soon as they had said it, gave her their notion of what the song had meant to her. A surprising number took it as a song of nostalgia for Canada, cherished by her during her exile abroad -- an idea which had never entered her head. Some were convinced that it was a love-song.

What did it mean to her? It meant what Hiraeth meant to Ceinwen Griffiths -- a longing for what was perhaps unattainable in this world, a longing for a fulfilment which was of the spirit and not of the flesh, but which was not specifically religious in its yearning. It meant her surge of feeling at the tomb of St Genevieve. It meant the aspiration toward that from which she drew her strength, and to which she returned when the concerns of daily life were set aside. It was the condition of being which lay beyond the Monica Gall who bossed Dad and Aunt Ellen into living together, who quarrelled and lost her dignity with her sister Alice, who spoke in honeyed words to the Bridgetower Trustees, who denied poor Veronica Bridgetower the money which might deliver her from a hateful bondage, who cheated and scraped for Giles Revelstoke, and endured all his whims in return for his absent-minded and occasional affection. It lay through, but beyond, the world of music to which she was now committed -- the singer's bondage which tonight had so plainly shown to be hers. It was the yearning which had been buried in the heart of her mother, denied and thwarted but there, forever alive and demanding. It was a yearning toward all the vast, inexplicable, irrational treasury from which her life drew whatever meaning and worth it possessed. It was the yearning for --? As Ceinwen's song had said, not all the wise men in the world could ever tell her, but it would last until the end.

[TWELVE].

"I trust that you will not think that I have acted unwisely, but that is what has been done with the large sum of money which you made over to me in February. I hope that the enclosed reports will persuade you that it has been well spent." Thus ran part of Monica's letter to the Bridgetower Trustees, which Mr Snelgrove read to them at a meeting held in the following May.

"I'm sure Mother would have been greatly surprised to know that she had partly financed the production of a new opera," said Solly, and the others could only agree.

And such an opera! The criticisms which Monica had enclosed were all agreed that it was an extraordinary work, containing flashes of genius, but freakish in the extreme. That the principal tenor should have been transmuted into an ass, by sorcery, was part of the story. But that he should bray -- musically, of course, but still undoubtedly braying -- for the whole of the middle act, was certainly hard to swallow. Part of the audience had refused to take it seriously as a musical work, and had been tempted to boo. But Stanhope Aspinwall, in two long articles which he wrote about the new opera, rebuked them sharply. Here, he said, was the most original musical talent to emerge for many years, asserting itself -- pulling the public's leg, perhaps, but that was the privilege of genius. His analysis of the work contained many criticisms which, he said, he had been obliged to bring against Giles Revelstoke's work on several occasions -- lyricism at the expense of dramatic movement, conventional passages of orchestration which seemed to have been thrown together in a hurry and never revised, a sacrifice of musical to literary values in some sections -- but judged as a whole, a work of splendid qualities.

All of the critics agreed that in Monica Gall, the Canadian soprano who played the small but important role of Fotis, the serving-maid turned sorceress, the world of chamber opera had gained the most gifted singer of many years. She could not act particularly well, but that could be mended. It was good news indeed that the British Opera Association had chosen this work to perform in Venice, in September, at the Festival. There was even a kindly mention of the fact that some of the money for the excellently-mounted production had been supplied by a Canadian trust fund, founded for the furtherance of the arts; thus, the British critics agreed, the dominions were returning some of the loving care and cultural dower which had been lavished upon them in their early days by the Motherland. It was to be hoped that more might follow.

"Without knowing it, we seem to have covered ourselves with glory," said the Dean, laughing.

But Miss Pottinger and Mr Snelgrove agreed in all seriousness.

"Certainly we made no mistake when we chose Monica Gall for the first beneficiary. I wonder if we shall have to choose another. May I say that I hope not?"

They all looked at Solly. They knew that since late April, Veronica had been pregnant.

"You cannot possibly hope that as fervently as I do, Mr Dean," said Solly, with a laugh which took some of the bite out of the remark.

It was at about that same time that Chuck Proby (as Mr Gall could not be persuaded to do it) went to the cemetery vault, where the body of Mrs Gall was identified by him, and buried in the grave which the now soft ground permitted to be dug. The law demanded it, and someone has to do these things.

NINE.

Monica had been five full days in Venice, and so far she had seen no more of it than could be glimpsed in flittings from her hotel to the theatre, and thence to Giles' favourite restaurant. True, she had been several times in a gondola, which might have been romantic if she had not always been accompanied by her portable typewriter, or the very heavy suitcase which contained the orchestra parts for The Golden Asse, or Giles himself in his anti-Venetian mood. The city was a tourist-trap, he told her, and its romance was spurious; the Venetians were all scoundrels; had they not launched income tax, the science of statistics, and state censorship of books upon the world? He laughed away her meek proposals that, when the long days of work were done, they might see some of the sights; he had seen the sights, years ago, and they were not worth having. They had not come to Venice to be tourists, but to work.

Monica, who had not seen the sights, would not in the least have minded being a tourist. Giles laughed still more, and said that she was provincial. Apparently this was a very dreadful thing to be, and she timidly asked Domdaniel about it.

"Giles is playing the man of the world," said he. "You mustn't mind. Everybody's provincial if you put 'em in the right spot to show it, and nobody more so than the man who won't be impressed, on principle. When we get this mess straightened out I'll show you the town; I know some very pleasant people here."

The mess to which he referred was The Golden Asse, which had been undergoing revision ever since its appearance in London in May. The work had revealed weaknesses in performance, and when Revelstoke had been convinced that the weaknesses were real, and had tried to correct them, the opera had seemed to collapse; its individual parts were still good, but they could not be made to stick together satisfactorily. Domdaniel had been reassuring; the commonest thing in the world, said he; always happened when a big work wanted revision; all that was needed was patience. But patience had worn thin, for The Golden Asse was to appear as part of the current Music Festival in Venice, and revisions had gone on, minutely but tiresomely, until yesterday. Most of the tinkering had been done on the orchestral interludes which linked the many scenes of the opera; Monica had copied, and re-copied, and copied again, principally because it was convenient for her to do so, being so close at hand, but also to save the money of the Association for English Opera -- money which she had herself provided in substantial but insufficient amount. There is no such thing as enough money for opera, she had discovered.

The pattern of work was surprisingly regular. Domdaniel would find fault with a passage, and suggest how it might be re-cast: Revelstoke, after argument, would re-write the passage in his own way: Domdaniel, having first said that the new version would do splendidly, was likely to find in a few hours that it was -- well, not quite right, and suggest further revision, usually along the lines he had originally proposed. Revelstoke would again re-write, producing something manifestly inferior to what he had done before. Domdaniel would then suggest that the earlier revision be used -- with a few changes which he could easily make himself, to spare Giles trouble. But Giles did not want to be spared trouble; he wanted the music as he had written it in the beginning. There were shocking rows.

The parts which would shortly be distributed to the music desks in the orchestra were a muddle even for musicians, who are used to muddled parts. Over the neat script of the professional copyist were gummed countless bits of paper upon which were corrections in Monica's script, almost as neat. But over these might be further corrections, in Giles' beautiful but minute script, or in the bold hand of Domdaniel. Further revision appeared, in Domdaniel's hand, in red pencil. Yet, somehow, at orchestra rehearsals the players made sense of it all. Philosophical and usually patient men, they interpreted the muddle under their eyes, and brought forth beauty.

That was what made it all worth while. The Golden Asse was a thing of beauty. Giles' libretto followed faithfully the second-century story of the unfortunate Lucius, whose meddling in magic caused him to be transformed into an ass, from which unhappy metamorphosis he was delivered only after he had achieved new wisdom. But the character of the music emphasized the tale as allegory -- humorous, poignant, humane allegory -- disclosing the metamorphosis of life itself, in which man moves from confident inexperience through the bitterness of experience, toward the rueful wisdom of self-knowledge. Where the music came from, not even Giles' most intimate associates -- and this now meant Monica and Domdaniel -- could guess, for as the work had progressed he had grown increasingly freakish, his moods alternating between one of morose incivility and another of noisy hilarity. There was nothing of the serene wisdom of his music to be discerned in himself.

The journey to Venice had been, for Monica, a misery. She had travelled with Giles and the stage director, Richard Jago. Giles had insisted that wagon-lits were an extravagance, so they had slept in their seats; nor would he hear of meals in the restaurant-car -- they must picnic, it would be so much cheaper and jollier. So they had eaten innumerable hard rolls into which lumps of bitter chocolate were stuffed, fruit-cake, and cheese, with occasional swigs at a flask of brandy. Monica had not liked this stodgy diet, and had bought a few pears for herself; they had made her ill, as Giles, who had an English mistrust of fruit, had predicted, and after their arrival in Venice Domdaniel had had to dose her for a couple of days with Fernet Branca.

But it was not the physical discomforts of the journey which had made it so exhausting. Giles was in one of his hilarious moods, and insisted that she and Jago sing lewd rounds with him, for hours at a time. Giles was entranced by rounds and catches, especially those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in which, as they were sung, simple-minded obscenities were revealed. And so, to the astonishment of their fellow-travellers (when they had any) they sped across Europe to the strains of --

Adam catch'd Eve by the furbelow, And that's the oldest catch I know; Oho, did he so!

Jago, who was a mild and withdrawn young man, could never quite master the time of that one, and Giles abused him whenever they sang it. They had better luck with --

I lay with an old man all the night; I turned to him, and he to me; He could not do so well as he might He tried and he tried, but it would not be.

But Giles' favourite was the most musically intricate and poetically inane of his large repertoire. It was a true "catch", and the words ran --

I want to dress; pray call my maid, And let my things be quickly laid.

What does your Ladyship please to wear?

Your bombazine? 'Tis ready here.

See here, see here, this monstrous tear.

Oh, fie! It is not fit to wear.

But when the "catch" made itself heard, he would enjoy it as heartily as any port-soaked member of an eighteenth-century catch-club, and smack Monica resoundingly on her bottom as he sang "And let your bum be seen?" -- as though there were some possibility that the point might be missed.

"For God's sake, Giles, will you stop acting the Beloved Vagabond for just half an hour? My head aches," Jago would protest.

"You have no zest for life," Revelstoke would reply. Or he might sulk for a time, or doze. But soon he would be at it again, insisting that they try once more to master Purcell's --

I gave her cakes, and I gave her ale --

which they never succeeded in doing, for Jago was not up to it. Monica was heartily glad, dulled though her senses were by the nausea which the bad pears had caused her, when the train crept through some dirty suburbs and Giles announced that they were at last sniffing the undeniable stench of the Queen of the Adriatic.

Still, that was all past now. The first Venetian performance of The Golden Asse in its revised version was to take place tonight, and Monica, at half-past four, was already in her dressing-room, arranging and re-arranging her make-up materials, or lying on a sofa looking out at Venetian rooftops, so quiet under the September sunshine.

To be here, in a dressing-room all her own, in the celebrated Teatro della Fenice -- was that not romance enough, without common, touristy sight-seeing? Yes, certainly it was. One must grow up some time, and would she not herself be, in a few hours, one of the sights of Venice? Yes, of course, that was the idea. And anyhow, after the first night was out of the way, Sir Benedict would take her sightseeing.

At twenty-three, resting can be hard work. Monica was thoroughly tired of it. She ran down the broad, empty passages until she came to the large, gold-framed mirror which was fastened to the wall in the long gallery which gave the artists access to the stage and passed through the door from daylight into the darkness of the huge stage itself. Above her was the soaring, dusty mystery of the flies, hung thickly with drop-scenes; somewhere, high in the lantern above the stage, a sunbeam penetrated the murk, touching the cobweb of fly-lines in a dozen places before it came to rest at last on one of the huge canvases. Once again Monica experienced the unfamiliar feel of a raked stage, so subtle in its enticement toward the footlights, so unexpectedly resistant in its retreat toward the back-cloth -- for the single basic setting which served for The Golden Asse was already in place. One setting for an opera with eighteen scenes -- it still seemed strange to her, nurtured on the elaborate naturalism in The Victor Book of the Opera; yet it was wonderful how well this unit-setting worked. She yielded to the slope, and stood directly in front of the prompter's box, looking across the orchestra pit toward the ornate music desk from which, in a few hours, she must follow Domdaniel's nuances of direction.

Then she raised her eyes, and became conscious that in the dimness of the beautiful theatre something was happening -- some work was in progress. As she became accustomed to the gloom she saw that a work-party of those little old women who seem to be inseparable from European opera houses were busy hanging garlands of fresh flowers across the front of the first tier of boxes.

For an instant she felt, stronger than ever before, the mixture of elation and dread which she was learning to recognize as part of her professional life, part of her fate. It was exquisitely delicious and terrifying.

Then, suddenly, from the wings there came a slight draught, and hastily clutching a scarf about her throat she scampered back to the protective warmth of her dressing-room.

[TWO].

When next she stood upon that stage and felt the gentle urging of the rake toward the footlights, she resisted it, not only because she must go nowhere that Richard Jago had not told her to go, but also because she knew by now that crowding the footlights is not the best way for a singer to make herself heard; Domdaniel had given her the valuable tip that stage centre, fifteen or twenty feet from the footlights, is the preferred place on most good operatic stages, and Monica had learned all the polite ways of getting herself to that precise area. For the Association for English Opera was a very polite organization; no shrewishness, no temperament, no bluster marred its rehearsals as sometimes happens among the operatic stars of lesser breeds without the law; nevertheless, there were well-tried English ways of establishing that what was best for the individual singer was also best for the work, for the production, for the balance of the ensemble, and when the position of advantage was Monica's by right, she had no trouble in getting it. She shared it now with Amyas Palfreyman, the tenor who sang the part of Lucius; Mr Palfreyman was a contradiction of everything that Ludwiga Kressel had said about tenors -- that they were all fat, short, the possessors of too-small noses and an excess of female hormones; he was tall, lean, beaky of nose and, if not aggressively masculine, certainly not effeminate; furthermore, he liked Monica and gave her all the help he could without compromising his own role. Monica was very lucky to be making an important early appearance with Mr Palfreyman, and she knew it. Lucky, too, to be under the direction of the great Sir Benedict Domdaniel who, from his place in the pit, kept everything under his control, blending the ensemble of voices and orchestra with immense skill, so that the singers rested upon his conducting as gently and as confidently as gods in a Renaissance picture, resting upon a cloud. Ordinarily the Association for English Opera could not have afforded the services of Sir Benedict; he appeared in Venice, as he had done in London when the opera was first heard, at something like half his ordinary fee, because he wanted to advance the music of Giles Revelstoke.

Oh yes, Monica was very lucky, and she knew it, but during the performance she had no time or inclination to glory in her luck; she was too busy showing fortune that she was worthy of its favours. She had slaved to learn the craft of the opera singer; make-up, classes in posture, hours of toil with the demanding Molloy -- she had spared herself nothing. Not only was she able, now, to sound right; she could also look right. She had learned from Giles to be naked before him and to be neither ashamed nor brazen; it was not so very different to appear before a great audience with the same candour. Not that she was naked, though the costume which the designer thought fit for the entrancing servant-enchantress Fotis was a revealing one. "Not every day you get an opera singer who peels well," the designer had said, "so we may as well make the most of you." And that was what he had done. The mirror in the long gallery beyond the stage told Monica a pleasing tale. It was amazing, she thought, how well a rather sturdy girl ("strong as a horse", Sir Benedict had said) could be made to look. Oh, it was good to be as strong as a horse and yet, on a large stage, to look pleasantly fragile!

Domdaniel in the pit was not the only good angel who was watching over her. She moved about the stage in the pattern taught her by Richard Jago. She maintained the mental discipline -- the dual consciousness of the actress, which enabled her to give herself to her part, and at the same time to stand a little aside, criticizing, prompting and controlling -- which had been so carefully imparted to her by Molloy. And as well as the feat of balance which enabled her to keep all these elements in control she still found a place in her mind for the humility of the interpreter toward the creator, of which Domdaniel had spoken as they drove from Oxford. It was not to the spirit of Bach, long-dead, but to Giles, very much alive and somewhere in the theatre, that she made her offering: would he be pleased?

He certainly should have been pleased, for the opera was very well received. It provided a kind of delight particularly pleasing to an Italian audience, for it gave almost unbroken opportunities for beautiful singing; modern enough in idiom, it was not modern in asperity and rejection of sheer vocal charm; but neither was it sentimental, a succession of musical bon-bons. It was, some of the critics who had descended upon Venice for the Festival said in their dispatches to Germany, to Rome and to Paris, a comic masterpiece -- goldenly, sunnily comic, splendid in its acceptance of the ambiguity of man's aspirations toward both wisdom and joy. Musically it was somewhat novel to Italian ears, for virtually all of its music was either for the ensemble or for the orchestra; but, as the Italian critics pointed out, firmly but kindly, this suited the English voices, which were fine instruments, governed by keen musical intelligence, but not of the highest operatic order. Amyas Palfreyman was generously praised, particularly for his musical braying in Act Two, when he was transformed into an ass; and Monica Gall was mentioned in all the notices as a new singer of great promise, freshness, and uncommon agility and sweetness of voice combined with a lower register which was striking in the scene where she figured as an enchantress.

But these sweets were to be enjoyed later, after the critiques had been collected. The immediate reward was the cheering at the end of the performance, when the cast appeared again and again in front of the curtains; when Sir Benedict appeared with them, and called the orchestra to its feet; when Sir Benedict led Giles Revelstoke forward for the kind of ovation which an audience chiefly Italian gives to a composer who has delighted it.

It was a great evening, marred a little by Giles' behaviour afterward when Sir Benedict, who liked to keep up certain princely customs, invited the company to have supper with him at the Royal Danieli. The applause had affected Giles adversely, and he was in his morose mood; he would not go, and he took it ill that Monica did want to go. He thought she should have been pleased enough to return with him to their very modest hotel near the Fenice. She felt some concern for him, as he stood apart, scowling at the party as it embarked in gondolas. But when, half an hour later, she was sitting at Sir Benedict's left hand on the terrace which overlooks the Grand Canal (the place of highest honour, on his right hand, was understandably reserved for Lalage Render, the British premiere danseuse etoile who danced the role of Psyche in the ballet of Cupid and Psyche which was one of the high points of the opera) she was not troubled about Giles, or about anything. She was perfectly happy, for she knew that she had done well, and (true Canadian that she was) she could enjoy her treat because she had earned it.

But the best was still to come. Sir Benedict took her back to her hotel by gondola, and although he may have found it slightly chilly, and though Monica was perpetually readjusting the scarf around her throat, it was romantic and moonlit enough. When he helped her ashore he thanked her for a delightful evening and kissed her hand. Monica started a little, and drew it away more quickly than was polite.

"What's the matter?" said Sir Benedict.

"Nothing; nothing at all. Only -- this seems all wrong. I mean, I feel very much your pupil and -- I don't know, I suppose I feel I ought to be thanking you -- or something."

"You make me feel fully a hundred and ten," said Domdaniel, his bald head gleaming nacreously in the moonlight. "Still -- good of you. I hope you'll be my pupil for a long time. But after tonight I'm very happy to think of you as a fellow artist, as well." And he kissed her hand again.

Monica was not at all sure how she found her way to bed.

[THREE].

The opera was scheduled for only eight performances in Venice, and when the first of these was successfully over, Monica was free to see something of the city, which she did in the company of Domdaniel. He was an ideal sightseer, for he knew when to stop, had friends in the city, was acquainted with the best restaurants and thoroughly understood the first principle of aesthetic appreciation, which is that it can usually be doubled by sitting down. Monica, flattered by her new status as fellow-artist, had never enjoyed herself so much. Surely such attention from the great man meant that she had finally made the grade, and was counted among the Eros-men rather than the Thanatossers? Indeed, she began to wonder if she might not be something of a sex-squaller as well, for as she travelled about the city with Domdaniel she observed young men eyeing her and pulling furiously at their ear-lobes; a few of the more daring flung out their hands, with the index-finger leading, as she passed, and Sir Benedict explained that these were gestures of admiration, comparable to the wolf-whistles which she had heard (always for other girls) at home.

Giles remained sullen, and she saw little of him. On the fourth day Domdaniel said, as they were at lunch together -- "Giles has got his way at last. He's going to conduct tonight."

"Oh? Will we have to rehearse with him?"