He did not mean it. He judged her voice colourful but lacking in carriage.
Cassy, leaning forward, struck the keys, giving him the note and again she sang, this time the Libiamo, which, old as the hills, claptrap, utterly detestable, none the less served to display the bravura quality of her voice.
When it passed, Paliser sprang up, faced her. "Open your mouth! There! Wide!"
Cassy, familiar with the ritual, obeyed. Paliser peered into the strawberry of her throat. It was deep as a well and he moved back.
"You have the organ but you do not know how to use it. You don't know how to breathe."
Cassy forgot that he was young, that she was, that in the great room in the great house they were alone. Through the shutters came the smell of lilacs, the sorceries of spring. In the sexlessness of art these things were unnoticed. For the first time she liked him. It was his frankness that drew her, though if he had been a frank old woman she would have liked him as well.
"My father says that. He says it is Ma Tamby's fault. He can't bear her."
For a while they discussed it. Paliser maintaining that were it not for the war she ought to go to Paris and Cassy asserting, though without conviction, that the specialty of the Conservatoire consisted in dried fruit.
Finally she said: "It must be late. I have a wrap somewhere and oh! my orchids."
The young person was summoned. The wrap was recovered, the orchids reappeared.