Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/160

 They did detest her, everything about her from her thin, dry hair, frizzed out to imitate abundance, to her shifty eyes exactly like her mother's, from her stooping shoulders, to her long bony hands, which clattered out loudly the Schubert Marche Militaire. When she had finished, "Really quite a talent," observed Mme. Garnier taking pains to be audible; and, "Remarkable for her age," agreed Jean-Pierre.

He was relaxing morally, in an inexpressible ease at finding his head clear, his heart at rest. To own yourself, to look at life from behind a stout wall of critical cynicism—it was to be in safety at last! He barely glanced at the next player, a nondescript, precocious child, who murdered a Moment Musical, her short thin legs dangling from the stool. And the next, the one who played the Liebestraum, a tall young lady with the self-admiring graces and manners of an opera singer on the concert platform. He looked at his watch again and wondered how long it would be before the stupid school performance would be over, and he could get away for an aperitif at the Café du Grand Bouleau on the Place d'Armes and an evening with

He saw that another player was coming forward, a slim tall girl with thick shining dark hair held back by a white ribbon like the others. She stood for an instant to bow to the audience before sitting down at the piano, and he could look up full into her unconscious face, gazing out over his head impersonally with shy, liquid, dark eyes. She was breathing a little rapidly, her young breast rising and falling under the filmy white of her dress. A timid propitiatory smile curved her sensitive mouth and arched her long, finely-drawn eyebrows.

Not a muscle of Jean-Pierre's face changed; every line of his careless, confident attitude froze taut as it was. And underneath this motionless exterior, he felt his heart hotly, joyfully weeping in a passion of thanksgiving, like a frightened lost child who has come into the right way. He lost all sense of connection with his body and yearning, worshipping, clamoring, imperiously calling, humbly beseeching, he gazed out from the bars of his immobile, well-dressed external self at the