"When we met I
couldn't have said, 'Beware! I am THE Miss Falbe.'"
"No, my dear; but I think you ought, somehow, to have conveyed the
impression that you were a tremendous swell. You didn't. I have been
thinking of you as a charming girl, and nothing more."
"But that's quite good enough for me," said Sylvia.
The two young men joined them after this, and Hermann speedily became
engrossed in reading the finished Variations. Some of these pleased him
mightily; one he altogether demurred to.
"It's just a crib, Mike," he said. "The critics would say I had
forgotten it, and put in instead what I could remember of a variation
out of the Handel theme. That next one's, oh, great fun. But I wish
you would remember that we all haven't got great orang-outang paws like
you."
Aunt Barbara stopped in the middle of her sentence; she knew Michael's
old sensitiveness about these physical disabilities, and she had a
moment's cold horror at the thought of Falbe having said so miserably
tactless a thing to him. But the horror was of infinitesimal duration,
for she heard Michael's laugh as they leaned over the top of the piano
together.
"I wish you had, Hermann," he said. "I know you'll bungle those tenths.
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