He stood beside her, placid. "Why are you angry?" he asked.
"I am not pleased that my rules should be broken. Karen has many privileges. She must learn not to take, always, the extra inch when the ell is so gladly granted."
He leaned on the piano. Her controlled face, bent with absorption above the lacey pattern of sound that she evoked, interested him.
"When you are angry and harness your anger to your art like this, you become singularly beautiful," he remarked. He felt it; and, after all, if he were to remain at Les Solitudes and attempt to scale those Alpine slopes he must keep on good terms with Madame von Marwitz.
"So," was her only reply. Yet her eyes softened.
He raised the lace wing of her sleeve and kissed it, keeping it in his hand.
"No foolishness if you please," said Madame von Marwitz. "Of what have you and Karen been talking?"
"I can't get her to talk," said Mr. Drew. "But I like to hear her play."
"She plays with right feeling," said Madame von Marwitz. "She is not a child to express herself in speech. Her music reveals her more truly."
"Nur wo du bist sei alles, immer kindlich," Mr. Drew mused. "That is what she makes me think of." With anybody of Madame von Marwitz's intelligence, frankness was far more likely to allay suspicion than guile. And for very pride now she was forced to seem reassured. "Yes. That is so," she said. And she continued to play.