The rope has frayed where it bears on the rim of the wheel.

Nick had heard her play through the very beginning of it a dozen times, until he was screaming at her in his head to go on. Well, now she did, watching her own hands busying up and down the keyboard as if they were astonishing automata that she had wound up and set in motion, in perfect synchrony, to produce this silvery flow of sound.

There is recitativelike declamation, lingering melodiousness and rushes of busy passagework.

Georg Simmel (1902) pointed out that the money economy pervasive in a city fosters individualism, blasé attitudes, and secondary relations, thus linking urbanism with a particular social psychology.