Explore "Paying Guests" by E.F. Benson on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
For the rest of the week Miss Howard had very little time to attend to Mind, and just about as little inclination. She considered that Mind had shewn the greatest inattention to her improvisation: she had committed herself and it to Mind with the complete trust that a passenger puts in the engine-driver when he makes a journey by train, and there had been an accident. Not only had she quite forgotten the end of the passage for octaves, but there had been no sign whatever of an encore, whereas Colonel Chase who had already been cured of a cold, the tantrums and the loss of a pedometer, had been loaded with benefits. It was not fair, and though Mrs. Bliss assured her that those last few chords would linger for ever in her memory like the sound of a great Mental Amen, Miss Howard would far sooner have got back into the Chopin waltz and finished according to plan, than have so agreeably affected Mrs. Bliss. Besides, those chords composing the great Mental Amen, would have come in anyhow.
Mind, too, was doing nothing for Mr. Kemp, and Mrs. Bliss's argument that his baths and massage were a materialistic hindrance to his recovery was met with the deadly parry that she was having baths and massage too, and was improving enormously.