"You play?" said Mrs. Dalloway to Mrs. Ambrose, taking up the score of
_Tristan_ which lay on the table.
"My niece does," said Helen, laying her hand on Rachel's shoulder.
"Oh, how I envy you!" Clarissa addressed Rachel for the first time.
"D'you remember this? Isn't it divine?" She played a bar or two with
ringed fingers upon the page.
"And then Tristan goes like this, and Isolde--oh!--it's all too
thrilling! Have you been to Bayreuth?"
"No, I haven't," said Rachel. `"Then that's still to come. I shall never
forget my first _Parsifal_--a grilling August day, and those fat old
German women, come in their stuffy high frocks, and then the dark
theatre, and the music beginning, and one couldn't help sobbing. A kind
man went and fetched me water, I remember; and I could only cry on
his shoulder! It caught me here" (she touched her throat). "It's like
nothing else in the world! But where's your piano?" "It's in another
room," Rachel explained.
"But you will play to us?" Clarissa entreated. "I can't imagine anything
nicer than to sit out in the moonlight and listen to music--only that
sounds too like a schoolgirl! You know," she said, turning to Helen, "I
don't think music's altogether good for people--I'm afraid not."
"Too great a strain?" asked Helen.
"Too emotional, somehow," said Clarissa. "One notices it at once when a
boy or girl takes up music as a profession.
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