After supper the excitement over the piano increased. They all gathered round March like people watching a conjurer's trick when he slid the action into place and proved, chromatically, that every hammer would strike and every key return.
"But it isn't tuned at all," Sylvia wailed. "It will be hours before you can play on it."
"Minutes," March corrected with a grin. And they watched, amazed,—but less so really than an ordinary piano tuner would have been,—at the way he caught octaves, fifths and fourths, sixths and thirds up and down that keyboard like a juggler keeping seven tennis balls in the air.
"There you are," he said suddenly, before it seemed that he could be half-way through and began playing a dance.
"But you can play tunes!" cried Sylvia. "I thought you only did terribly high-brow things. That's what Rush said."
"I was pianist in the best jazz orchestra in Bordeaux," March told her.
He stayed there at the piano quite contentedly for more than an hour. Some of the musical jokes he indulged in (his sense of humor expressed itself more easily and impudently in musical terms than in any other) were rather over his auditors' heads. Parodies whose originals they failed to recognize, experiments in the whole-tone scale that would have interested disciples of Debussy, but his rhythms they understood and recognized as faultless.
And Mary danced. With Graham when she must, with Rush when she could. The latter happened oftener than you would have supposed.
"Those Wollastons can certainly dance," Sylvia remarked to her brother. "I wonder they'll have anything to do with us. Let's just watch them for a minute.—Here, we'll turn the piano around so Mr. March can see, too."
It was queer, Mary reflected, how easy it was for her and also, she was sure, for her lover, to acquiesce in a spending of the hours like that; how little impatient she was of the presence of these others that kept them apart. She gave no thought to any maneuver, practicable or fantastic, for stealing away with him, not even when, as the party broke up for the night it became evident that chance was not going so to favor them.