No one even mentioned her profession, and possibly some of the guests did not quite realise that she was the famous Cordova.

Lady Maud never suggested that she should sing, and Lord Creedmore detested music.

The old piano in the long drawing-room was hardly ever opened.

It had been placed there in Victorian days when 'a little music' was the rule, and since the happy abolition of that form of terror it had been left where it stood, and was tuned once a year, in case anybody should want a dance when there were young people in the house.
A girl might as well master the Assyrian language in order to compose hymns to Tiglath-Pileser as learn to play the piano nowadays, but bridge is played at children's parties; let us not speak ill of the Bridge that has carried us over.
Margaret was not out of her element; on the contrary, she at first had the sensation of finding herself amongst rather grave and not uncongenial English people, not so very different from those with whom she had spent her early girlhood at Oxford.

It was not strange to her, but it was no longer familiar, and she missed the surroundings to which she had grown accustomed.