Music was almost entirely neglected during my years at Miss Reach’s. I had no lessons, but was sent to practise by myself for an hour every afternoon on a horrid little upright piano in the dreary dining-room.

Of course I did nothing of the sort; in the first place, I had nothing to practise, for I certainly had no intention of learning any of the really dreadful drawing-room pieces with which the piano was covered. Occasionally I played through one of them, for I read music quite easily. How I jibbed at the “Prière d’une Vierge”! The “Gems of Scotland,” set in arpeggios and triplets, were sham jewels for which I had unmitigated contempt, and one or two pieces by Brinsley Richards made my flesh creep. I had such frightful attacks of low spirits in that dreary back room that I never think of it without horror. After some months I began to connect music itself with those four walls and those hideous tenth-rate compositions which lay in bilious green and yellow covers on the top of the piano, and it seemed to me that my own love of music was being slowly poisoned to death. So much for atmosphere! When I left Miss Reach’s at the end of the year, I would not have cared if I had never set eyes on a piano again. I almost hated the sight of one. Something lovely in me had died. Or had it only fallen into a deep and dreamless sleep, like the long sleep of the Dornröschen of legend?