"May I write ?" She looked at him with the friendliness of her smiling eyes and her grave mouth.
"Is it necessary to ask ?" she said.
Michael turned back to his seat, for his mother had had quite enough of her sister-in-law, and wanted him again.

She looked over her shoulder for a moment to see whom Michael was talking to.
"I'm enjoying my concert, dear," she said.

"And who is that nice young lady?
Is she a friend of yours ?" The interval was over, and Hermann returned to the platform, and waiting for a moment for the buzz of conversation to die down, gave out, without any preliminary excursion on the keys, the text of Michael's "Variations." Then he began to tell them, with light and flying fingers, what that simple tune had suggested to Michael, how he imagined himself looking on at an old-fashioned dance, and while the dancers moved to the graceful measure of a minuet, or daintily in a gavotte, the tune of "Good King Wenceslas" still rang in his head, or, how in the joy of the sunlight of a spring morning it still haunted him.

It lay behind a cascade of foaming waters that, leaping, roared into a ravine; it marched with flying banners on some day of victorious entry, it watched a funeral procession wind by, with tapers and the smell of incense; it heard, as it got nearer back to itself again, the peals of Christmas bells, and stood forth again in its own person, decorated and emblazoned.
Hermann had already captured his audience; now he held them tame in the hollow of his hand.

Twice he bowed, and then, in answer to the demand, just beckoned with his finger to Michael, who rose.