Explore "The Skeleton Key" by Bernard Capes on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Miss Kennett, still in process of qualifying herself for a musician, was at work on Czerny's fifth exercise, which, like the _pons asinorum_ of an earlier strategist, could present an insuperable problem to an intelligence already painful master of the four preceding. To pick up one note with her was, like the clown with the packages, to drop half a dozen others; to give its proper value to the right hand was to leave the left struggling in a partial paralysis. Still she persevered, lips counting, eyes glued to the page, pretty fingers sprawling, until a sudden laugh at the open door of the room startled her efforts into a shiver of unexpected harmony. She looked up with a shake and a smile that suggested somehow to the observer a bird scattering water from its wings in a sunshiny basin.
"O, Frank!" she exclaimed, and stretched herself with glistening easefulness.