He had nothing to say to them, and the knowledge of his inability filled him with an uncomfortable sense of his want of normality, just as did the consciousness of his long arms and stumpy legs.
There was a night he remembered when Francis had insisted that he should go with him to a discreet little supper party after an evening at the music-hall.

There were just four of them--he, Francis, and two companions--and he played the role of sour gooseberry to his cousin, who, with the utmost gaiety, had proved himself completely equal to the inauspicious occasion, and had drank indiscriminately out of both the girls' glasses, and lit cigarettes for them; and, after seeing them both home, had looked in on Michael, and gone into fits of laughter at his general incompatibility.
The steps and conversation passed round the corner, and Michael, stretching his bare toes on to the cool balcony, resumed his researches--those joyful, unegoistic researches into himself.

His liberty was bound up with his music; the first gave the key to the second.

Often as he had rested, so to speak, in oases of music in London, they were but a pause from the desert of his uncongenial life into the desert again.

But now the desert was vanished, and the oasis stretched illimitable to the horizon in front of him.