Murtagh Molloy, on whose judgement I place great reliance, says that Monica is young for her age and needs waking up. We shall see what can be done.

Yours sincerely, BENEDICT DOMDANIEL.

Dean's Yard Westminster SW1

It was Enclosure 2 which startled the members of the Bridgetower Trust, assembled one hot July night to consider these communications.

"I must say they're very cool about our money," said Solly, who had been having trouble meeting some bills, and was sore on the subject.

"We may rely on Jodrell and Stanhope," said Mr Snelgrove, sticking up for the profession.

"Perhaps we may, but what about Domdaniel?" said Solly. "He's 'packing her off' for three months in France without so much as by-your-leave. Have we given him an absolutely free hand?"

"Yes, and look at this," said Miss Puss, who had secured the itemized account as soon as Snelgrove had laid it down. "Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, forwarded from Bumpus to France -- nine volumes, twenty-seven guineas -- one hundred and fifty dollars! For books, of all things! Can't she learn from anything less than that?"

"Not a hundred and fifty dollars, Miss Pottinger," said Snelgrove; "you are forgetting the rate of exchange."

"So far as I am concerned, a five-dollar bill and a pound note are the same thing," said Miss Puss. "If there is any drop in the value of the pound, I am sure it is merely temporary."

"And look what Domdaniel is paying himself," said Solly. "He's seen her twice, and he's soaking us ten guineas a time. And this fellow Molloy -- five lessons a week at three guineas each! Svengali would have been glad of such fees. We'll have to protest. This is ridiculous."

"We're making a beggar on horseback of this girl," said Miss Puss, "and she'll ride to the Dee. Mark my words."

It was Dean Knapp who undertook the ungrateful task of being the Voice of Reason.

"We must bear in mind that we are simply appointed to carry out the terms of the Trust," said he, "and the income from your mother's estate, Solomon, is very large. Indeed, if what is spent to maintain and instruct the girl during the next six months is no more than we shall have to pay to settle this statement, it will not disperse one-quarter of the total in a year. Have we any right to accumulate money?"

"We have no right to accumulate funds at all, except what might be dictated by common prudence," said Mr Snelgrove. "Certainly we cannot withhold money. When Mrs Bridgetower made this will I tried to reason with her, but I am sure you all know how effective that would be. She was determined that her beneficiary should not be stinted."

"Not stinted!" said Solly. "And here I am pushed to the very edge of my bank account to settle a bill for a hundred and thirty-two dollars for repairs to Mother's old car, when I've already had to sell my own to get ready money! It's intolerable!"

"It is the law," said Mr Snelgrove. "We are not empowered to build up any large surplus. I fear that we shall have to tell Jodrell and Stanhope to spend more -- and get Sir Benedict to spend more. Discreetly, of course. The girl need not actually know."

"As I understand it, we have to spend the income on roughly a million dollars, which is invested in three and four per cents, and with taxes deductible," said the Dean, and when Mr Snelgrove nodded, he looked for a time at the ceiling, and then spoke what was in all their minds. "More than any of us is ever likely to have for himself."

"That is one of the difficulties of being a trustee," said Mr Snelgrove; "that is why trustees often behave so strangely."

That night Miss Puss was very severe with her old housekeeper, who had left a light burning needlessly, and Solly went to bed drunk, to Veronica's great distress. Though the difficulties of their marriage had been many since they came under the Dead Hand of Mrs Bridgetower, this was something new.

SIX.

"There you have it," said Sir Benedict. "Orders from headquarters: we must spend more money. I must spend more on having you trained. You must spend more, presumably, on your way of living. The lawyers here are doubling your personal allowance."

"O dear," said Monica. "I wish they wouldn't do that."

"Why? Didn't you learn anything about spending money in Paris? I particularly asked Amy to give you a few pointers about that."

"She did. She was wonderful to me, and told me a lot about clothes and make-up and hair-dos and things. But, please, Sir Benedict, I don't want to get involved in all that kind of thing. It's not what I'm here for."

"But apparently it is what you're here for. These Bridgetower people want their money spent, and it's your job to spend it. Most girls would jump at your chance."

"No, no. I'm here to be trained as a singer -- a musician, I hope --"

"Why the distinction?"

"Amy took three of us to a party in Paris that some musical people were giving, and a string quartet played, and afterward I was talking to them, and said I was training to be a musician, and when they found out I was a singer, they laughed. One of them said, 'Music is a very nice hobby for a singer; it gives him a complete change from his profession'."

"I know; musicians are full of jokes about singers. Justified, most of them. But we'll try to make a musician of you, as well. What's that to do with all this extra money which must be got rid of?"

"Well, I can't escape a feeling that it will make it harder for me to do what I want to do. I mean -- it seems to cushion life, somehow. It cuts you off from people, and experiences, and that's just what I need. I found that out in Paris. Those girls at Amy's; they were awfully nice, and I had a fine time, but they weren't serious. They're just dabblers -- in the nicest possible way -- but still dabblers. I'm serious. I want to be a professional. If possible I want to be an artist."

"And you're afraid having plenty of cash will cut you off from that?"

"Yes. Don't you agree?"

"Look around you, I'm far from rich, but I'm pretty comfortable, and I take care to keep my fees high. But I'm rather widely regarded as an artist."

"Of course. But you've made your way. You didn't begin with all this."

"My family were well-off; I was born with a very good weight of silver spoon in my mouth. In my student days I never missed a meal or wore a shabby suit, and I worked just as hard and agonized just as much as the fellows who hadn't sixpence. All money can do for a musician is keep him from discomfort and worry about bills -- and that's a very good thing."

"Those girls in Paris were all ambitious, until it meant real work. But they all knew they didn't actually have to work, and that made all the difference."

"Had they any talent?"

"I don't know. But how do I know that I've any talent myself?"

"You don't, but you're industrious. Murtagh says you work like a black. But that has nothing to do with money. You really must shake off these fat-headed nineteenth-century notions you have about musicians being romantic characters who starve in garrets, doing immense moral good to the world through the medium of their art. Now look here: money alone can't hurt you. If you're a fool, or if you haven't any talent, or not enough, it will influence the special way in which you go to the devil. Money is a thing you have to control; it must play the part in your life that you allot to it, and it must never become the star turn. But take it from me, too much money is less harmful than too little. Wealth tends to numb feeling and nibble at talent, but poverty coarsens feeling and chokes talent, and feeling and talent are the important things in your job and mine."

"Yes, but -- I don't know whether I have any talent, and neither you nor Mr Molloy will say anything one way or the other. And I do know that I haven't much feeling. Mr Molloy says so, too. He's always at me to express more, but I haven't much to express."

"What would you have to express -- at twenty-one?"

"Surely if I have any feeling, any insight into music, it ought to show itself by now?"

"Not necessarily. Some people are born with huge, gusty typhoons of feeling, all ready to be unleashed. Others have to learn to feel. And when they're both forty, you'd have a hard time telling one from the other. But when they're fifty the typhoons will be getting weaker, and the feeling which has been carefully nurtured and schooled may well be growing still. I don't suppose anybody ever told you that."

"Never."

"Look at your physical type. Medium blonde, northern-looking, good solid bones, strong as a horse, I'll bet, and with an excellent, good big head. You're not one of those little southern passion-pots, with a rose in her teeth and a stiletto tucked into her garter. She's got feeling; you've got intelligence. She's a sprinter, you're a miler. You'll have to learn, painstakingly, things that she seems to have known from her cradle. But because she's never had to learn them, they may desert her quickly -- after an illness, or when her lover runs off with another girl, or something. Whereas you, once you've learned a thing, will cling to it like a bulldog, or like a snapping-turtle which is supposed never to relax its hold till sundown."

"I see," said Monica, who was overjoyed to be compared to a bulldog or a snapping-turtle under these circumstances.

"So get on with the job. Stop fretting because you're not worldly-wise and chock-full of Beethovenian Sturm und Drang at twenty. That's not your type at all. Stop fussing that comfort is going to knock the props from under your genius. Develop what you've got: make it possible for your emotions to grow. Get on with the job. Work, work, work. How are the languages?"

"Not too bad, Amy said."

"Well, work harder and make them damned good. And do what Murtagh tells you; if anybody can make a singer of you, he will. And you may take it from me that you'll get all the experience you want, soon enough. Most people reach a point where they're wishing experience would stop crowding them. Anyhow, it isn't what happens to you that really counts: it's what you are able to do with it. The streets are crammed with people who have had the most extraordinary experiences -- been shipwrecked, chased out of Caliph's harems, blown sky-high by bombs -- and it hasn't meant a thing to them, because they couldn't distill it. Art's distillation; experience is wine, and art is the brandy we distill from it. -- Now, you'll have to go. I've a man coming about some music for a contemporary composers' series. And don't worry; we'll think of some ways to spend the Bridgetower money. -- By the way, did you ever know this Mrs Bridgetower?"

"Oh no; she was an invalid for years, I think. Anyway -- I wouldn't have known her."

"She sounds like a loony. This Trust of hers is silly. Still, if the money has to be spent, we'll spend it."

[TWO].

Experience -- well, Paris had been experience. Amy Neilson had taught her a lot about eating, for instance. It had been a surprise to Monica to find that her very best manners weren't the thing at all, according to Amy, and she had had to modify them, not in the direction of more gentility, but less. And the gay little laugh with which she had been accustomed to pass off any social difficulty -- Amy had quickly rooted out that little laugh. There had been, well, dozens of things that Amy had discouraged, always in the kindest possible way, and Monica had been a quick learner. Her clothes had been reformed in the direction of plainness; some rings and earrings, which were certainly not expensive, but which she had once thought very pretty, had been discarded; a tendency toward cuteness in dress and manner had withered under Amy's hint that to be cute was not the whole end of woman.

Yes, that was all experience. But shallow, surely? Not the raw material for one of Molloy's muhds. What else? That party to which Amy had taken her in that wonderful apartment on the Rue Scheffer -- just like the movies, with a view which included the Eiffel Tower -- that had been experience. For it was a very musical party, to introduce the work of a promising young composer, and Monica had gone to it in a reverential spirit. And what had happened? The assembled musicians, and patrons and critics and concert agents had listened far less intently and politely than the audience of the Community Concerts in Salterton would have done; some of them, sitting on a stair which led to a gallery above the salon, had actually talked, in loud whispers, and not about the music, either! That was experience, surely -- to discover that in Paris, of all places, real music-lovers could be so rude as to talk while music was being played? She had mentioned this to Amy, and Amy had laughed. "You don't have to be serious about it all the time," she had said. But surely you did have to be serious about it all the time? Wasn't that what Sir Benedict had just -- been telling her?

But Sir Benedict wasn't very serious. He just shot off a lot of talk which seemed to be serious, and turned suddenly into jokes- - the silly kind of jokes the English seemed to like so much. Still, a visit to him always made Monica feel that music was something even better than being serious -- it was exciting. And what a marvellous person! So tall, and with a wonderful figure, even though he was fifty-three (she had checked him in Grove) and it didn't matter a bit that he was so bald and had really an uncommonly big nose. Her attitude toward him was worshipful, but she did wish he would explain himself a little more fully. His remark that she was intelligent, for instance. Why couldn't he have expanded that? If she was intelligent, why couldn't she summon up more muhd for Molloy?

What had he meant when he said that some people had to learn to feel? Surely that was a contradiction? And all that about distilling experience from the wine of life. What experience had come her way that could be distilled? Did he mean that everything was experience?

As Monica pondered, a large, middle-aged nun, with a school-girl in her charge, entered the bus and sat down beside her. The nun composed her vast skirts, and fished a rosary of workmanlike appearance from their depths. "Come along now, Norah," she said in a loud, cheerful voice to the girl at her side, "never waste a minute; let's say a rosary for the conversion of the people on the bus."

Was that experience? Could it be made into anything? Did it add anything to her?

Distilling thus, Monica went back to Courtfield Gardens, buying some special cakes for her tea on the way, to celebrate having spent half an hour with the exciting Sir Benedict.

[THREE].

October passed in more work with Molloy. A splendid combination gramophone and radio had arrived one day at Courtfield Gardens for Monica, with a note from Sir Benedict urging her to make good use of it, and to buy as many records as she wished. It was unfortunate that on the very day of the arrival of this glossy monster, Peggy Stamper and one of her dirty young men in corduroys dropped in.

"Coo!" said Peggy, surveying it in wonder; "have you bought that?"

"I suppose so," said Monica; "it's to be part of my training."

Peggy and the young man commented freely, and not without envy, on the kind of training which demanded so costly an object, and it was plain to Monica that the radiogram put her, so far as these two were concerned, in a different world from themselves. They were poor on principle; it was part of their creed that nobody who was serious about art ever had a bean, and those of their group who had allowances from home took good care not to offend against this tenet. When they left, Monica knew, without anything having been said about it, that her position on the fringe of Peggy's group had become even more remote. They had nothing against her, but obviously she was rich, and that was that.

Without being aware that she was doing so, she salved her wound in a manner common to the rich; she bought a lot of expensive albums of recordings, some swansdown cushions for her divan, and some luxurious things to eat; these expenditures numbed, but did not remove, her sense of loss. So she increased the dose of her anodyne; she bought some new clothes -- really good ones, of the kind that Amy approved for the well brought up young girl, and a quiet but expensive winter coat. If she had lost her place in the corduroy group, she might as well be thoroughly out of it. The clothes and the pleasure of listening to the machine insulated her against loneliness for almost a fortnight. But she knew, every night, and as she prepared her breakfast each morning, that another bout of that terrible destructive despair which had seized her on her first arrival in London was imminent, waiting for an opportunity to descend. It would not be quite the same, for her circumstances had changed, but it would be of the same essence.

Sometimes she had to fight hard against panic. Should she confide in Meg McCorkill? Yes, but confide what? That she was afraid that money was cutting her off from serious work and the people who might be her friends? How silly it seemed when put into words! That the English winter, which was now beginning, filled her with dread? That pegging away at French and German made her feel like a schoolgirl, without a schoolgirl's resilience against the boredom of study? Meg would have a ready and immediate remedy for both those ills -- frequent visits to Beaver Lodge. But three months in Paris, and the English spring, had put a barrier between her and the raw simplicities of Beaver Lodge which seemed to her to be insurmountable.

Of course she had Molloy's unfailing method of summoning and controlling emotion. She had only to breathe a happy and confident muhd, and serenity and confidence would certainly follow. But it didn't work. She determinedly set about it on two occasions, and both ended in crying fits. Real heaviness of heart could not be budged by such imaginative effort.

[FOUR].

Relief came suddenly. One day, at the end of a lesson in which Molloy was particularly exacting, he said: "Sir Ben wants to hear you tomorrow, and he's coming here. So be on your best behaviour and do me credit."

Half an hour of the next day's lesson had passed before Sir Benedict Domdaniel appeared; in Monica's eyes he seemed more elegant than ever against the background of Molloy's shabby teaching-room, and beside the stubby figure of the Irishman. He heard her sing some of her folksongs, and declined Molloy's earnest request that she be allowed to recite some passages of Shakespeare for him.

"Done much about scales, Murtagh?"

"Not yet, Ben, but I'm goin' to get at them right away. She's ready for a good grind on exercises. But you know my way; the exercises must be linked with some real music, or you'll get nothing but a technical voice. But now the voice is warmed up, I can see where we're goin'."

"You've done a good job. Better voice than I thought it might be." He smiled at Monica. "Are you pleased with yourself?"

"I can't say," said she. "You must be the judge."

"Yes, but you know that you sing better than when you came here, don't you?"

"It feels better; I didn't know I had such a big range."

"Your voice is beginning to declare itself. Some technical work will make it very useful. But at present you haven't much to say with it, have you? And that's really what I've come about; it's time you went to another coach."

"Leave Mr Molloy!"

"Oh no, not at all. He'll continue the work on your voice, make it agile and strong and give you a sound technical equipment. But I think you ought to go to another man to learn something about music generally, broaden your musical experience. You don't want to be just a singer; well -- you must learn something more than singing."

"Aw, now, Ben, I'll give her all o' that she can take," said Molloy; "I've started her already on some Shakespeare, and if you'd only let her show you what she can do, you'd get the surprise of your life. Come on, give him the Seven Ages --"

"Murtagh, I don't want to hear the Seven Ages or anything else. I know exactly what I want her to do, and if you'll listen --"

"Ben, some day you'll insult me once too often. Are you suggesting that I'm not capable of giving this girl a good cultural training? Is that what you mean? Because if so --"

"You're the best voice-builder in London. I tell you that, and don't forget I got my training with old Garcia, and I know what I'm saying. Isn't that enough for you?"

"You want to snatch a promising pupil away from me and give her to God knows what charlatan --"

"She's not your pupil; she's my pupil, and I'm responsible to the What's-Its-Name Foundation for her. I'm doing the best I can for her. That's why I sent her to you in the first place, Murtagh, and if you weren't so damned stubborn you'd know it. And I'm not taking her from you; I just want to send her to Revelstoke for some coaching in things you probably haven't time for."