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.

It was not only a singer who had sung, but an individual one called Sylvia Falbe.