And it occurred to her (as next day she wrote down) that reading was, among other things, a muscle and one that she had seemingly developed. She could read the novel with ease and great pleasure, laughing at remarks, they were hardly jokes, that she had not even noticed before. And through it all she could hear the voice of Ivy Compton-Burnett, unsentimental, severe and wise. She could hear her voice as clearly as earlier in the evening she had heard the voice of Mozart. She closed the book. And once again she said out loud: ‘I have no voice.’ And somewhere in West London where these things
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