“Thanks,” said Tom gratefully. “You’re right. This is foul-tasting tonic, but it’s good to be reminded how far we haven’t traveled yet.”
Walter’s hand strayed gently to his friend’s shoulder.
“Short fights aren’t interesting,” he said, and turned to the girl, whose patient aloofness through this little conversation, so unintelligible to her, was, again, revealing.
“Go back to the hymn,” he said.
“A hymn?” The word had no meaning for her.
“‘Lead Kindly Light,’” he explained.
“Oh, that,” she said, and sang it through without interruption. It was street singing, adapted to penetrate through the closed windows of Staithley and by sheer shrillness to wring the withers of the charitable. Tom Bradshaw, amateur of music, found nothing in this insistent volume of song to account for Walter Pate’s interest; she made, tunefully, a great noise in a little room, and he wished that Walter would stop her, though not for the same reason as before. But Walter did not stop her, he listened and he watched with acute absorption and when she had finished, “again,” he said, gesturing Tom back into his chair with a menacing fist.
“It goes through me like a dentist’s file in a hollow tooth,” Tom protested.
“You fool,” said Mr. Pate pityingly, and, to the girl, “Sing.”
“Now,” he said when she had ended, “I don’t say art. Art’s the unguessable. I say voice and I say lungs. I say my name’s Walter Pate and I know. Give me two years on her and you’ll know too. If you’d like me to tell you who’ll sing soprano when the Choral Society do the ‘Messiah’ at Christmas of next year, it’s that girl.”