“I wish, Helen, you would be more particular in your choice of companions....”
Yet Catherine and Helen became close friends, and Madge was merely an adjunct to their evening journeys home....
§ 3
Time was passing; Catherine was creeping through her teens, and every night in the drawing-room at 24, Kitchener Road the piano strummed for exactly one hour, and then stopped. By and by the music-lover might have begun to detect certain tunes that were familiar to him. A few of Mendelssohn’s “Songs Without Words,” Tchaikovsky’s “Valse Triste,” the adagio part of Beethoven’s “Pathetic Sonata.” ...
Once, too, a prelude of Chopin’s, chosen for its unChopin-like qualities....
There came a day when Catherine’s playing began to be very slightly superior to the instrument at her disposal. Nor did the latter improve as time passed. All the lower notes responded with a nasal twang reminiscent of a Jew’s-harp. The upper ones were so physically inert that when pushed down they refused to come up again without assistance, and so unanimous as to pitch that the striking of the wrong note was no more inharmonious than the striking of the right one....
Yet it was on this instrument that Catherine practised a certain Fantasia in D Minor of Mozart’s that won her a first prize at the Upton Rising Annual Eisteddfod.... The examiner was a wizened old man with blue spectacles. From the first he annoyed Catherine. Her music persisted in curling up.
“You should use a flat case,” he said, “not one of these roll ones.”
Then she discovered that the middle page of the music was not there. Presumably she had left it in the waiting-room.
“You can’t go and fetch it,” he said. “I think you’re very careless....”