Thomasina Davis was not sanguine about Mrs. Lister's easy yielding to Richard's wishes. She was prepared to talk to his parents by the hour if need be; she would have been willing to live on bread and water and go without shoes so that he should be able to study. She was determined to behold in him the fruit of her labors. Faversham had been a fellow pupil in the three happy years away from Waltonville; to send Richard Lister to him with supple, well-trained fingers and with fine taste, to have Richard say to him that he was a pupil of Thomasina Davis, was a reward she had promised herself since Richard had sat beside her piano on a high chair, enchanted by her music. Thomasina, unlike Mrs. Lister, had a profound respect, an adoration, indeed, for genius. This adoration was innate, but it owed its strength to certain events in her past, a past which seemed to Mrs. Lister to have been pathetically empty of most of women's joys.
When Commencement and the Commencement dinner were over, Richard felt suddenly restless. He realized that there was nothing that he must do, that no lessons waited. He sat for a while talking with his mother's guests, then he went out to the kitchen, meaning to escape across the campus to the chapel and play. That was what he wanted and needed, the touch of the smooth keys under his fingers, the sound of the full, rich organ tones, to give him, instead of this sense of idleness and emptiness, a consciousness of all the work that was beginning.
But there were obstacles in the way of his playing. The chapel organ and the assembly room piano were public; he would have an audience in a few minutes, and he did not wish an audience. If he could find some one to play duets with him, he would have the volume of sound for which his ear longed. Thomasina was away; only Cora Scott remained. Cora did not read well, but they could play compositions which she knew.
'Manda paused in her dishwashing to regard him with a warm and beaming glance which expressed entire sympathy with him in his flight.
"Goin' to git out, honey?"
"Yes, 'Mandy, I'se goin' to git out."
Making a wide détour in the shrubbery and round the back of the chapel, he approached the Scotts' porch. Then he stopped short. There in white splendor sat the stranger whom he had seen that morning in the chapel gallery. He turned promptly away.
"No sitting for an hour listening to that!" said he.
Then it was, swayed by the slight incident of Evan Utterly's presence, that Richard, who had hitherto sailed in such a calm domestic stream, turned his boat into another and an alien channel. He said to himself that he would play, that he would perish if he did not play. He considered going to Thomasina's, even though she was not at home and rousing 'Melia from her afternoon nap to let him in. But when he had reached Thomasina's gate, he thought of Eleanor Bent.
Eleanor played well; he had heard her at Thomasina's. She was pretty and bright, but not very friendly. There was, he believed, something queer about her and her mouselike little mother. He had a vague feeling that his own mother would not quite approve of his going to their house.