"Her voice just one half-note too high" in H. G. Wells' "The Cone"

Question

From 'The Cone' by H. G. Wells:

There was another pause. Did the man mean to take the thing coolly? Did he after all know? How long had he been in the room? Yet even at the moment when they heard the door, their attitudes . . . . Horrocks glanced at the profile of the woman, shadowy pallid in the half-light. Then he glanced at Raut, and seemed to recover himself suddenly. "Of course," he said, "I promised to show you the works under their proper dramatic conditions. It's odd how I could have forgotten."

"If I am troubling you--" began Raut.

Horrocks started again. A new light had suddenly come into the sultry gloom of his eyes. "Not in the least," he said.

"Have you been telling Mr. Raut of all these contrasts of flame and shadow you think so splendid?" said the woman, turning now to her husband for the first time, her confidence creeping back again, her voice just one half-note too high. "That dreadful theory of yours that machinery is beautiful, and everything else in the world ugly. I thought he would not spare you, Mr. Raut. It's his great theory, his one discovery in art."

My question is this. One half-note is a duration of time, not meaning height of voice. Thus what is this sentence actually meaning?

The atmosphere of these paragraph is rather tense since wife and another man (friend) was actually caught by the husband (overhead the conversation between two lovers). So, the voice of the wife seeming went up a bit, which is my understanding.

Answer 1

“Half-note” has multiple senses, including:

half note, n. 1.a. An interval equal to half a tone; a semitone.

1.b. Chiefly North American. A note having a duration equal to half that of a whole note or semibreve; a minim.

_{Oxford English Dictionary.}

In the passage from Wells, we want sense 1a, since the context makes it clear that “half-note” is an interval of pitch, not a duration. Also, Wells was British, so it is unlikely that he would use the American sense 1b. “Minim” is the usual term in the UK.

Here are three more examples of sense 1a in literary works. In each case it should be clear that an interval of pitch is intended.

In this doth the secret of harmony lie,
Ne’er begin a duet e’en a half-note too high.

_{William Hayley (1782). The Gentleman’s Magazine, May 1782, page 252.}

“I never open my window,” said Crevetti, who seemed to be aware of this little peculiarity, “because the fog and the damp air he spoil the string—in one cinque, one five minute, down he go, one half-note below concert pitch.”

_{Horace Smith (1843). Adam Brown, the Merchant, pages 55–56. London: H. Colburn.}

“Calmness of countenance might be cultivated; and so might the unwinking or unalarmed tranquillity of eye which betokens thoughts coming reluctantly from else where; and then the tone of voice might express some thing of it, both by slower enunciation and by being pitched a half-note lower than the key of the conversation around.”

_{Nathaniel Parker Willis (1857). Paul Fane, or, Parts of a Life Else Untold, page 157. New York: Scribner.}