Hesitancy or contradiction she flattened and left behind her.
She had an air of owning Bach that became peculiarly vexatious to Althea, who, in silence, but armed with new standards, was assembling her own forces and observed, in casting an eye over them, that she had heard five times as much music as Miss Buckston and might be granted the right of an opinion on it.

She took satisfaction in a memory of Miss Buckston's face singing in the Bach choir--even at the time it had struck her as funny--at a concert to which Althea had gone with her some years ago in London.

It was to see, for her own private delectation, a weak point in Miss Buckston's iron-clad personality to remember how very funny she could look.

Among the serried ranks of singing heads hers had stood out with its rubicund energy, its air of mastery, the shining of its eye-glasses and of its large white teeth; and while she sang Miss Buckston had jerked her head rhythmically to one side and beaten time with her hand as if to encourage and direct her less competent companions.

Sometimes, now, she looked almost as funny, when she sat down to the piano and gave forth a recitative.
After Bach, Woman's Suffrage was Miss Buckston's special theme, and, suspecting a new hint of uncertainty in Althea, whose conviction she had always taken for granted, she attacked her frequently and mercilessly.
'Pooh, my dear,' she would say, 'don't quote your frothy American women to me.