But all the while she was answering she had felt that he was not listening; that he did not care.
And she cared so much! She knew now that all her practising through the long hard months of study, had been for Cyril.

Every scale had been smoothed for his ears, and every phrase had been interpreted with his approbation in view.

Across the wide waste of waters his face had shone like a star of promise, beckoning her on and on to heights unknown...
And now she was here in Boston, but she could not even play the scale, nor interpret the phrase for the ear to which they had been so laboriously attuned; and Cyril's face, in the flesh, was no beckoning star of promise, but was a thing as cold and relentless as was the waste of waters across which it had shone in the past.
Billy did not understand it.

She knew, it is true, of Cyril's reputed aversion to women in general and to noise; but she was neither women in general nor noise, she told herself indignantly.

She was only the little maid, grown three years older, who had sat at his feet and adoringly listened to all that he had been pleased to say in the old days at the top of the Strata.