Then she sat down. Those two words had been her whole answer to that woman since she was twenty-two, and a duke's drawing room was not going to be where she changed it.
The Aylmer girls looked at the carpet. The clergyman's sister looked at the clergyman. Mr. Denning did not look away at all; Cordelia noticed that afterwards and not at the time.
She put her hands on the keys. She had been told to play the plainest thing she knew, and that was three bars of a tune she had lived inside for five weeks in a cold room in November.
She played it the way it had come to her: one line, unaccompanied, the left hand doing nothing at all. It lasted about nine seconds. Then she went on into the first variation. You cannot state a thing like that and simply stop, and her hands had been doing it every morning for eighteen months while a woman downstairs called it "the little air."
At the fourth bar, the Dowager's stick came off her lap and onto the floor. Nobody picked it up. The old woman was already getting to her feet, which she did not do quickly at seventy-one, and she spoke out loud while a woman was playing, which is not done:
"Stop."
Cordelia took her hands off the keys. Lady Wexford's face did something complicated: she had got exactly what she asked for, and she was about to be sorry.
"Come here to me," the Dowager said. "Not you, madam. Her."
Cordelia walked the length of the room with everybody watching.
"What is that?"
"An air, Your Grace."
"Whose?"
"I do not know. I was given three bars of it on a half-sheet."
"Given by whom?"