There are great musicians in the world who do not live in rooms which speak so decisively of a life given to music as the living-room of Miss Ellen Gall. There was no picture which was not musical in theme. Over the piano hung a collotype of an extremely artistic girl with a birdsnest of dark hair, playing the ‘cello to a rapt old man with a white beard; it was called Träumerei. Over the bookcase was a picture of Beethoven, much handsomer than life, conducting the Rasumovsky quartet with great spirit. A little plaster bust with a broken nose, said to be Mendelssohn, sat on top of the rosewood upright piano. And everywhere on the walls were little pictures of opera singers, cut out of magazines and framed.

There was only one picture without musical significance in the room, and that was of a middle-aged man, somewhat bald, wearing rimless pince-nez. He had been Miss Ellen’s fiancé, a high school teacher, and a man of great cultivation, for he had once had a poem printed in Saturday Night. They had been engaged for many years, waiting for his mother to die; it was agreed between them that their marriage would be too great a blow for the old lady to sustain, and they had considerately spared her. But when, at last, she did die, the high school teacher took a chill a few weeks later, and himself died of consumption the following spring. He had made Miss Ellen his heir, and she had moved his books and all his furniture into her house. But he had made her a legacy of something much greater; he had left her with the consciousness of having been loved deeply and gratefully (if not very adventurously), and this romance had sweetened Miss Ellen’s life as many a marriage has failed to do. In her crowded, fusty little house she lived with her own kind of music, and with memories which made up even for the obvious decline of Ogilvie’s.

The book which Monica took down was The Victor Book of the Opera, which the gramophone company had produced in 1917 to demonstrate the wonders of opera to a public which knew little of that art form—and also to let it be known what recordings of opera were available. Most of the singers whose pictures appeared in it, with elaborate coiffures, or richly whiskered, were dead; the costumes in which they were represented might appear, to a modern taste, to be funny and unbecoming. But to Monica, as to Aunt Ellen, it was still the bible of a great art with which they had no direct connection, and at which they dimly guessed. They listened to the Saturday afternoon broadcasts from the Metropolitan, of course, but in the theatre of their minds it was these dead ones of the past who appeared—Nordica, Emma Eames, Scotti, Caruso, and the brothers de Reske; from the fruity voice which served as guide to the broadcasts they heard of new singers, and new costumes and settings, but these never had the reality of the pictures in the book. This was the key to a great, glorious, foreign world; but it was a key which unlocked, not the door, but a spy-hole in it. And now, breathtakingly, the Bridgetower Trust seemed to have opened the door itself.

It was very like—well, rather like—another book in Aunt Ellen’s library, which she and Monica had both read with deep enjoyment more than once. This was The First Violin, by Jessie Fothergill; in it, a humble English girl with a lovely voice was engaged as companion to a wealthy old lady who took her to Germany to study; and there she had learned to sing from the magnetic—but daemonic and sardonic—von Francius, and had engaged in a long and sweetly agonizing romance with one Courvoisier, who was first violin in the orchestra, a man of mystery, and, in the end (for this was an English novel and such a denouement was inevitable) had proved to be a German nobleman, disguised as a musician for reasons highly creditable to himself and shaming to everybody else. It all took place in the real Germany, of course, the Germany before the end of the century, when Germans were terribly musical and cultured and even more romantic than the French. Domdaniel would do very well as von Francius, though he was rather too affable for a genuinely daemonic genius, and showed quite ordinary braces when he took off his coat. And who was to be the First Violin; who was to be Courvoisier?

It was awful to admit the thought, but how would it be possible to bring Courvoisier home to meet Ma? In the book he seemed to be a Catholic; wasn’t there some mention of a chapel in his ancestral Schloss? No Protestant would want a church right in the house. Ma would simply fly right off the handle at the thought of a Catholic; she might even greet Courvoisier by singing one of those Orange songs she remembered from her childhood—

Ma always sang “To Aitch”, with an arch look, for a Thirteener would not use the word itself; but somehow that only made it worse. Ma and Pa were wonderful, of course. They had given her everything, except music. That had come entirely from Aunt Ellen. The Galls had never been able to afford a piano, though they had somehow afforded a succession of second-hand cars. But as Ellen had a piano, and obviously didn’t need a car, what was the odds? If Monny wanted a piano, she could go to Ellen’s. She owed everything to Ma and Pa, and if only the Bridgetower Trust had not suddenly disorganized her life she need never have faced the problem of confronting them with Courvoisier, and Courvoisier with them. But now this problem, and everything that went with it, possessed her, and made her quarrel with George, who was the only thing even remotely like Courvoisier on the horizon.

Girls in novels never seemed to have parents except when they were of some use in the plot, and then they were either picturesque or funny. The Galls were neither; they were oppressively real and many-faceted. The girl in The First Violin was a vicar’s daughter, which was considered very humble by the other people in the book, but was not nearly so humble as being the daughter of one of the maintenance staff at the Glue Works. The only creature remotely like a vicar whom Monica had met was Dean Knapp, to whom she had taken an unreasonable dislike—not because of anything he had done or said, but because Miss Pottinger had hissed at her that she must address him as “Mr Dean” and not, as she had supposed proper, as “Reverend Knapp”. A vicar’s daughter would have known that. And the vicar and his wife in the novel had had the good sense to keep out of the story.

Pondering on The First Violin, Monica hunted up the book, which she had not read for two or three years. What a very musical book it was! The chapters were headed, not with bits of poetry as in Francis Marion Crawford, many of whose works she had read in the set which had belonged to the dead high school teacher, but with quotations of music. She had played them all, but they were so short that they did not really mean much. One was called Träumerei, like the picture over the piano. She picked out the theme again, and it remained unrevealing as ever. She put the book aside and began to play. Turn to music when you are unhappy, dear; that was the frequent counsel of Aunt Ellen.

She played Danse Macabre, for it reminded her of Domdaniel, and was besides a nice gloomy piece, suiting with her mood of romantic turmoil. She brought out very strongly the motif which her aunt had assured her was the rattling of dead men’s bones. It cheered her greatly, so she followed it with that sweet Flower Song by Gustave Lange, which was one of Aunt’s favourites. As she played, Miss Gall returned.

It was always easy to talk to Aunt Ellen. She didn’t have to have things explained to her so much as Ma always did, and when she disagreed she never jeered, which was Ma’s way. Besides, Aunt Ellen was a specialist in romance and dreams, and she never seemed to think that anything was really impossible. When the wonderful news had come about the Bridgetower Trust, Aunt Ellen had not waited for Monica to suggest that this might be the pathway to the wonderful world of opera; she had been first to say it; she had led the way in marvellous speculation. There was no dream that had to be shielded from her, for fear that she might mock; she was eager for dreams, and provided cup after cup of the sweet, milky tea which she and Monica found so helpful in the dreaming game. But about family—well, even Aunt Ellen might not see what Monica was driving at there. And so Monica took what seemed to her to be a safe tack.