Immediately, she entered into a state of conflict from which she never seemed to emerge: when she was playing the piano she felt guilty because of all the people starving to death in the world, and when she was at Party meetings she felt uneasy because she knew she wasn’t really very good at being a Communist and longed to be back at her piano. She couldn’t talk about Beethoven with anyone in the Party, and she couldn’t put the Party out of her mind when she was listening to Beethoven. The split in her hovered on a scale of evenly balanced tension. Then the scale tipped: she gave up music.