When Cecilia turned three her father and mother decided it was high time she started piano lessons. Clarence Everett had begun his when HE was three, and had done remarkably well; indeed his talent was becoming quite well known in the neighborhood already.
Fortune did so favor Cecilia. She tried very hard; but she never loved the instrument and as the three years of her lessons passed she came to hate it with a passion. The day lives infamously in the annals of Brown family history when Miss Brown, driven to desperate means by a maliciously tricky bit of J. S. Bach, stood, suddenly, on the bench, and smashed the oriental vase perched atop the piano, uttering a harrowing cry of exquisite exasperation. The poor teacher skittered away like a frightened animal, deaf to Mrs. Brown's pleading. From that day there were no more piano lessons for Cecilia. She was six years old.
For some time it seemed that the second Brown child - for such she was called, after George and Simon were born when she was four years old - had it not in her power to make a name for herself in anything. Under her parents' long-suffering encouragement she tried painting, sculpting, singing, even