'The adjective is excellent,' she said with a little face, as she put her violin into its case. 'If I remember right, Catherine and I felt it personal. None of us were ever educated, except in arithmetic, sewing, English history, the Catechism, and Paradise Lost. I taught myself French at seventeen, because one Molière wrote plays in it, and German because of Wagner. But they are my French and my German. I wouldn't advise anybody else to steal them!'
Langham was silent, watching the movements of the girl's agile fingers.
'I wonder,' he said at last, slowly, 'when I shall play that Beethoven again?'
'To-morrow morning if you have a conscience,' she said drily; 'we murdered one or two passages in fine style.'
He looked at her, startled. 'But I go by the morning train!' There was an instant's silence. Then the violin case shut with a snap.
'I thought it was to be Saturday,' she said abruptly.
'No,' he answered with a sigh, 'it was always Friday. There is a meeting in London I must get to to-morrow afternoon.'
'Then we shan't finish these Hungarian duets,' she said slowly, turning away from him to collect some music on the piano.
Suddenly a sense of the difference between the week behind him, with all its ups and downs, its quarrels, its ennuis, its moments of delightful intimity, of artistic freedom and pleasure, and those threadbare monotonous weeks into which he was to slip back on the morrow, awoke in him a mad inconsequent sting of disgust, of self-pity.
'No, we shall finish nothing,' he said in a voice which only she could hear, his hands lying on the keys; 'there are some whose destiny it is never to finish—never to have enough—to leave the feast on the table, and all the edges of life ragged!'