"It does take it out of one," Miss Dick panted complacently.
Gerald sat looking on with a barely perceptible smile.
"Won't you play something now?" Miss Dick said to him.
His eyebrows twitched slightly. "Not just yet, I think. In a little. I want to smoke a cigarette first." He passed out on to the terrace, and we all gazed after him. When he thought, I suppose, that the echoes awakened by Miss Dick had had time to subside, he came back, and began to fiddle with the music-stool, screwing it up and down. Yet when he did commence to play, after many preliminaries, it was in a broken fragmentary fashion, beginning things and suddenly dropping them after a few bars. I was prepared not to like him, but he had not struck more than a note or two when I knew I had never heard the piano really played before. In spite of myself I felt the dislike I had conceived for him slipping away, and then, just as I was commencing to enjoy myself, he stopped abruptly. He got up and walked over to the window where I sat.
"You haven't altered, Gerald," said Mrs. Carroll dryly.
"Do you mean my playing, Aunt?" he asked sweetly. "It is supposed to have got rather better, but I am sure you are right."
Mrs. Carroll gave something as nearly resembling a sniff as she could give. I saw she was not in love with her nephew; but Miss Dick's cat jumped on to his knee and he began to stroke it. There was something in his extreme self-possession which, though I knew it to be based on a profound sense of superiority to everybody present, I could not help admiring, just as I could not help admiring his playing, or, for that matter, his personal beauty, which was striking. And I admired the way he was dressed. While remaining quite conventional, it managed to suggest individuality, and its perfect taste, apparent in the slightest details, gave him, as he sat there, something of the finish, of the harmony and
