"Yes."
"And, Cordelia," Lady Wexford put her cup down, "Lydia sings after supper. That is the whole reason we are going. I want that understood before we get into the carriage, so we do not have to have any looks about it later."
"I understand it perfectly."
She did, as well. She had understood it for years.
Amberley is a great house with a bad plan, and its long drawing room runs 110 feet. Eleven guests came besides the two families: a Ludlow attorney's wife, who had heard Cramer play in London and had said so twice before the soup; two Aylmers from Bramfield; a clergyman and his sister. The rest were neighbors. Mr. Denning sat at the family end—the Duke's man of business, nineteen years at Amberley.
The Dowager came in late and sat down at the far end with her back to the fire. She did not go round the room; everybody saw that.
After supper, the candles were lit at the instrument end. Lydia was to sing. She had her book with her, bound in green: Italian songs. She held it against her all evening in the way people hold a thing they want asked about. Somebody asked. She said it was Paisiello and that she had been four years at it.
"How charming," said the attorney's wife. That was as far as it went. There was nobody in the room who could have kept up a conversation about Paisiello for two minutes.
Then the Duke, who had been at the fire with Mr. Denning watching the room the way tidy men do, spoke across it: "I am told the elder Miss Wexford plays. Will you begin for us?"
It meant nothing. He was filling twenty minutes before his mother went up. Cordelia stood, and her stepmother, before she had gone three steps, said it to the room:
"Cordelia, before you sit down, I am going to say it in front of everybody, since that is kinder than afterwards. You have been taught music. I have never denied it, and I have never grudged it. Your mother taught you. Your mother was taught by a man in Ludlow who played very well in a small room. That is the sum of it, and it is nothing to be ashamed of. But there is a difference between a woman who plays and a woman who performs. The difference is not application; it is not talent either, quite. It is knowing the size of the room you are in.
"This room has a lady in it who has heard Cramer play in London in her own house. It has Mr. Denning, who I am told has an ear, and it has my daughter, who has worked at her Italian for four years, and who sings after you, and who will have to follow whatever you leave behind you.
"So play something simple. You will only embarrass us if you reach. I have watched you reach at home these ten years past and never once said a word, because at home it costs nothing. Here it costs Lydia. Play the little air you play in the mornings—the one with the three notes at the top. Play it once through plainly and then stop. Do not put anything of your own into it. You have not got anything of your own to put into it, and every soul here will hear the joins. Do you understand me, Cordelia? Say that you understand me."
"I understand you," Cordelia said.