“If it pleases you, madam,” replied the wary Ashmead.
“It does more than please me; it does me good.”
“That reconciles me to it at once.”
“Oh, then you do not admire it for itself.”
“Not—very—much.”
“Pray, speak plainly. I am not a tyrant, to impose my tastes.”
“Well then, madam, I feel very grateful to anything that does you good: otherwise, I should say the music was—rather dreary; and the singing—very insipid.”
The open struggle between Joseph's honesty and his awe of the Klosking tickled Vizard so that he leaned back in his chair and laughed heartily.
The Klosking smiled superior. “He means,” said she, “that the music is not operatic, and the boys do not clasp their hands, and shake their shoulders, and sing passionately, as women do in a theater. Heaven forbid they should! If this world is all passion, there is another which is all peace; and these boys' sweet, artless tones are the nearest thing we shall get in this world to the unimpassioned voices of the angels. They are fit instruments for pious words set by composers, who, however obscure they may be, were men inspired, and have written immortal strains, which, as I hear them, seem hardly of this world—they are so free from all mortal dross.”
Vizard assented warmly. Ashmead asked permission to hear another. They sung the “Magnificat” by King, in F.