“May I beg the use of it?”
“No,” said the lady, a tall, bony spinster. “I cannot have it strummed on and put out of tune by everybody.”
“But this is not everybody. The lady I want it for is a professional musician. Top of the tree.”
“The hardest strummers going.”
“But, mademoiselle, this lady is going to sing at the opera. She must study. She must have a piano.
“But [grimly] she need not have mine.
“Then she must leave the hotel.”
“Oh [haughtily], that is as she pleases.”
Ashmead went to Ina Klosking in a rage and told her all this, and said he would take her to another hotel kept by a Frenchman: these Germans were bears. But Ina Klosking just shrugged her shoulders, and said, “Take me to her.”
He did so; and she said, in German, “Madam, I can quite understand your reluctance to have your piano strummed. But as your hotel is quiet and respectable, and I am unwilling to leave it, will you permit me to play to you? and then you shall decide whether I am worthy to stay or not.”