But they,
like him, had taken their note on those different occasions from their
environment. Perhaps if his father and mother came here . . . but
Michael's imagination quailed before such a supposition.
The third point, which gradually through these weeks began to haunt him
more and more, was the personality of Sylvia. He had never come across
a girl who in the least resembled her, probably because he had not
attempted even to find in a girl, or to display in himself, the signals,
winked across from one to the other, of human companionship. Always
he had found a difficulty in talking to a girl, because he had, in his
self-consciousness, thought about what he should say. There had been the
cabalistic question of sex ever in front of him, a thing that troubled
and deterred him. But Sylvia, with her hand on his shoulder, absorbed in
her singing, and directing him only as she would have pressed the pedal
of the piano if she had been playing to herself, was no more agitating
than if she had been a man; she was just singing, just using him to help
her singing. And even while Michael registered to himself this charming
annihilation of sex, which allowed her to be to him no more than her
brother was--less, in fact, but on the same plane--she had come to
the end of her song, patted him on the back, as she would have patted
anybody else, with a word of thanks, and, for him, suddenly leaped into
significance.
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