Anthony March might deny as much as he pleased that he was "enough of an Olympian to laugh" at life's ironies, but it remained true that his God had a sense of humor and that March himself appreciated it. When, well within that same twenty-four hours, a third member of the Wollaston family insisted upon telling him her troubles and asking him what she'd best do about them, he conceded with the flicker of an inward grin (not at all at the troubles which were serious enough nor at their sufferer who was in despair), that the great Disposer, having set out to demolish that philosophy, enjoyed making a thorough job of it.

It was about four o'clock on Sunday afternoon that he came to Paula's cottage at Ravinia to get the score to The Outcry. The maid who opened the door informed him that her mistress wasn't at home, but when he told her what he wanted, and she had gone rather dubiously up-stairs to see about it, it was Paula herself who, after a wait of ten minutes or so, came down with the manuscript in her hand.

He was, perhaps, just the one person in the world she'd have come down to see. All the explanation she volunteered to herself was that he didn't matter. It didn't matter, this was to say, if he did perceive that she had been crying for days and days and looked an utter wreck.

And then his errand brought her a touch of comfort. The acceptance of The Outcry for production restored the proprietary feeling she once had had about it. She was the discoverer of The Outcry and if you'd asked her who was responsible for the revival of interest in it and for the fact that it was now to be produced, I think she'd have told you quite honestly that she was. Hadn't she asked them all to come to her house to hear it? And sung the part of "Dolores" herself at that very informal audition?

And I'll hazard one further guess. It is that her quarrel with John made March's opera a rather pleasanter thing to dwell on a little. She had taken it up in defiance of his wish in the first place; her abandonment of it had acquired from its context the color of a self-sacrificial impulse. She would carry out her contract, she had told John down in Tryon, but she wouldn't sing "Dolores" for anybody. Well, now that her love-life with John was irremediably wrecked, there was a sort of melancholy satisfaction in handling, once more, the thing that stood as the innocent symbol of the disaster.

That's neither here nor there, of course. Paula was totally unaware of any such constellation about her simple act of deciding to carry down the score herself instead of handing it over to the maid.

The sight of him standing over the piano in her sitting-room cheered her and the look of melancholy she brought down-stairs with her was replaced by a spontaneous unexpected smile. Just as Mary, out at Hickory Hill, had predicted, she remembered how well she liked him. She laid the manuscript on the piano in order to give him both hands.

"I can't tell you how pleased I am about it," she said. "I wish you all the luck in the world."

He brightened responsively at that but looked, she thought, a little surprised, too.

"I am glad you're pleased about it," he told her. "I wasn't quite sure you'd know. Of course, they telephoned."

She stepped back, puzzled. "But of course I know!" she said. "Haven't I been working on it for weeks! Why, it was right here in this room that they decided on it. Days ago. I've been trying frantically to find you ever since."

"Oh," he said, "you mean The Outcry. I thought you were congratulating me on my engagement to marry Mary."

She stared at him in simple blank incredulity. "To marry Mary! Mary
Wollaston? You don't mean that seriously?"

"It's the only serious fact in the world," he assured her.

"But John—Does John know about it?" she demanded.

"Yes," he said.

She drew a long breath, then pounced upon him with another question. "Did you tell him about it, or was it Mary who did?"

"It was I," March said. "I was the first one to see him after it happened."

"He hadn't suspected anything, had he?" she persisted.

She was vaguely aware that he was a little puzzled and perhaps in the same degree amused by her intensity, but she had no interest in half tones of that sort.

When he answered in the sense she expected, "No, I can testify to that. He was taken completely by surprise when I broke it to him;" she heaved another long breath, turned away, and sat down heavily in the nearest chair.

"Poor old John!" she said. But she didn't let that exclamation go uninterpreted. "I didn't mean anything—personal by that," she went on. "Only—only I didn't think John could make up his mind to let her marry—anybody." Then in a rush—an aside, to be sure, but one he was welcome to hear if he chose.—"He wanted her so much all to himself."

Whether he heard it or not, he failed, she thought, to attach any special significance to that last comment of hers. He said that John had been very nice about it, though he was, as any father would be under the circumstances, taken aback. He had consented to regard the arrangement as an accomplished fact and would, March hoped, in time be fully reconciled to it. Then he went back rather quickly to the matter of his opera.

"Of course, it means more than ever to me now," he said, putting his hand on the manuscript, "to get this produced. If it goes moderately well it will help in a good many ways."

She found some difficulty in again turning her mind to this theme and answered absently and rather at random, until she perceived that he was getting ready to take his leave. He was saying something about an appointment with LaChaise.

"Is it at once?" she asked. "Do you have to go right away?"

"I'm to have dinner with him and his secretary, who can talk English, at six," March said, "but I thought I'd carry this off somewhere and read it before I talked with them. It's been a long way out of my mind this last three months."

"Don't go," Paula said. "It seems so—so nice to have you here. Sit down and read your score. Then you'll have a piano handy in case you want to hear anything." She added as she saw him hesitate, "I won't bother you—but I'm feeling awfully lonely to-day."

At that, of course, he relinquished, though a little dubiously she thought, his intention to go. She set about energetically making matters convenient for him, cleared a small table of its litter and set it in the window where he would have the best light; chose a chair for him to sit in; urged him to take off his coat; and began looking about for something for him to smoke—but not quite successfully. She was sure there were cigarettes of Mary's somewhere about.

He didn't care to smoke just now, he said. If he felt later like resorting to a pipe he would.

Was there anything else? Didn't he want a pencil and paper to make notes on? No, he was supplied with everything, he said.

But for all the ardor of these preparations of hers, she was a little disconcerted and aggrieved at the way he took her at her word and plunged into the study of his score.

She found herself a novel and managed, for five minutes or so, to pretend to read. Then she flung it aside and drifted over to the piano bench and after gazing moodily a while at the keyboard, began in a fragmentary way to play bits of nothing that came into her head. But she stopped herself short in manifest contrition when, happening to look around at him, she saw a knot of baffled concentration in his forehead.

"Of course, you can't read if I do that," she said. "I'm sorry." Then under cover of the same interruption, "How did John look when you saw him this morning? Like a wreck? What time was it, anyway? It must have been frightfully early that he left here because I waked as soon as it was really light and he was gone by then."

"I don't know that he looked particularly a wreck," March said. "Not any worse, I mean, than he looked out at Hickory Hill the day you opened the season here."

"He didn't say anything about me, did he?" she asked.

"No," March said, "I don't think he did."

"I suppose you'd remember it if he'd happened to tell you that he loathed and hated me and never wanted to see me again." Then she rose and went over to the opposite side of his little table and leaning down spread her hands out over his score.

"Oh, I know I said I wouldn't bother, but do stop thinking about this and talk to me for a minute. We're having—we're having a perfectly hideous time. He and I. We've been fighting like cat and dog for four days. I don't exactly know what it's all about, except that it seems we hate each other and can't go on. You've got to tell me what to do. It all started with you anyway. With the time you brought around those Whitman songs.—That was the day Mary came home from New York, too," she added.

"All right," he said, shutting down the cover upon his manuscript, "then Mary and I will try to patch you up. That is, if we haven't already done it."

Her face darkened. "Don't try to talk the way they do," she commanded. "I'm not intelligent enough to take hints. Do you mean that the whole trouble is that I'm jealous of Mary? And that now she's going to marry you I'll have nothing to be jealous of? Well, you're wrong both ways. There's more to it than that. And that isn't going to stop just because she's marrying you. She'll always be there for him. And he'll be there for her. You'll find that out before you've gone far."

He didn't seem disposed to dispute this, nor to be much perturbed about it, either. He annoyed her by saying, "Well, if it's a permanent fact, like snow in February, what's the good of taking it so hard?"

"You can go south in February," she retorted. Then she went on, "I want to know if you don't think I've a right to be jealous of her. I'd saved his life. He admitted that. But when we went south, afterward, he simply didn't want me around. Sent me home pretending I'd be wanted for rehearsals. And then he sent for her. They spent a week together—talking! As far as that goes, they could have done it just as well if I'd been there. They can talk right over my head and I never know what it's all about. Wait till they begin doing that with you! I don't suppose they will though. You're a talker, too. He told her things he'd never told me-about his money troubles. What he said to me was that he didn't want to stand in the way of my career. He left her to tell me the truth about it, later,—after I'd told him I didn't want any career—though I'd just been offered the best chance I ever had. And then, when he came and found that I'd done—for him—what he'd been trying to make me do for myself, he was furious. We fought all night about it. And when I came down the next morning, ready to do anything he wanted me to, he'd wandered off with Mary. To talk me over with her again.—Tell her some more things, I suppose, that I didn't know about."

March had nothing to interpose here, it seemed, in Mary's defense, for her pause gave him ample opportunity to do so. He merely nodded reflectively and loaded and lighted his pipe.

"Well," she demanded presently, "can you see now that there's something more to it than jealousy? Whatever I try to do, he fights. When I wanted to begin singing again last spring, he fought that. And when I wanted to give it all up, after he'd so nearly died, he wouldn't let me. And when I'd refused the best chance I'd ever had, for him, and then changed around and accepted it because of him, he seemed to hate me for doing that. And he simply boiled when I told him I'd gone and got the money, myself, from Wallace Hood."

"Yes," March said, so decisively that he startled her, "I know all about it up to there. That was Thursday afternoon, wasn't it? Go on from then."

The interruption disconcerted her. "There isn't much more—to tell," she went on, but a good deal less impetuously. "Except that we fought and fought and fought. About eight o'clock that night I said I was going to the park to see the performance;—just to get a rest from talking. Mr. Eckstein was there and the Williamsons and James Wallace, so I asked them all to come home with us. And Fournier and LaChaise, too. And we got on your opera and LaChaise played part of it and then I read a lot of it with Fournier. So they didn't go home till after three. John thought I was keeping them there in order not to be left alone with him.—Well, what was the good of talking, anyhow? We did get started again on Friday, though; all day long. And Friday night we—made up, in a way. At least, I thought we did.

"Well, and then yesterday morning Rush telephoned out from town and said he thought John ought to come in to see Mary. She wasn't very well. I told him to go if he liked. I was feeling perfectly awful, yesterday, myself—and I was billed for Thais last night. There isn't another soprano up here who wouldn't have cancelled it, feeling the way I did. But I told John that if he thought Mary needed him more than I did, he'd better go.—I wish he had gone. After he'd telephoned to say he wasn't coming—he'd talked to Mary herself, that time—he kept getting colder and gloomier and more—unendurable from hour to hour. And after the performance, we had the most horrible fight of all. He told me I had kept him away from Mary on purpose,—because I was jealous of her. He said he could never forgive himself for the way he'd treated her—in order to curry favor with me. And he said that the first thing in the morning he was going to her. That's all.—Oh, well, I said a few things to him, too. Do you wonder?"

By way of a flourish, she flashed to her feet again at this conclusion (she'd been up and down half a dozen times in the course of her appeal to him as jury), and walked away to a window. But after the silence had spun itself out to the better part of a minute, she whipped round upon him.

"Have you been listening to a word I've said?" she demanded.

"Yes," he said, but with the contradictory air of fetching himself back from a long way off. "Truly! I've listened to every word. And I don't wonder a bit."

"Don't wonder at what?"

"That you said a few things to him, too. You've got a valid grievance, it seems to me. You couldn't be blamed for quarreling with him over it as bitterly as possible."

She barely heeded the words. They never did mean much to Paula. But his look and his tone reached her, and stung.

"Look here!" she said with sudden intensity. "Before we go any farther, I want to know this. Did Mary really need John, yesterday?"

She saw him turn pale and she had to wait two or three long breaths for her answer. But it came evenly enough at last.

"I happened to turn up instead. And she's perfectly all right, to-day."

Her eyes filled with tears. She turned forlornly away from him and dropped down upon a settee. "You hate me, too, now, I suppose. As well as he."

He sat down beside her and laid a hand upon her shoulder. "My dear," he said—and his own voice had a break of tenderness in it,—"I couldn't hate any one to-day if I wanted to. And I never could want to hate you. If there's anything I can do to help with John Wollaston…. But you see, if you want to keep your grievance you don't need any help. Nobody can take it away from you. It's only if you want to get rid of it—because it's making you beastly unhappy, no matter how valid it is—that you need any help from me or any one else. If that's what you want, I'll take a shot at writing you a prescription."

"Go crawling back to him on my knees, I suppose," she said in a tone not quite so genuinely resentful as she felt it ought to be. "And ask him to forgive me. What's the good of that when he doesn't love me?—Oh, of course I know he does—in a way."

His hand dropped absently from her shoulder. After a thoughtful moment he sprang up and took a turn of the room. "Do you know," he said, halting before her, "'in a way' is the only way there is. The only way any two people ever do love each other. That's what makes half the trouble, I believe. Trying to define it as if it were a standard thing. Like sterling silver; so many and so many hundredths per cent. pure. Love's whatever the personal emotion is that draws two people together. It may be anything. It may make them kind to each other, or it may make them nag each other into the mad-house, or it may make them shoot each other dead. It's probably never exactly the same thing between any two pairs of people…"

"Don't talk nonsense," she said petulantly.

"I'm not a bit sure it's nonsense," he persisted. "I only just thought of it, but I believe I've got on to something. Well, if I'm right, then the problem is to adjust that emotion to your life, or your life to that emotion, in such a way that the thing will work. There aren't any rules. There can't be any. It's a matter of—well, that's the word—adjustment."

She could not see that this was helping her much. It was not at all the line she'd projected for him. Yet she was finding it hard not to feel less tragic. She had even caught herself, just now, upon the brink of being amused. "Wait till you've tried to adjust something, as you say, with John, and have had him tell you what you think until you believe you do. When he's really being perfectly unreasonable all the while."

"Of course," March observed with the air of one making a material concession, "he is a good bit of a prima donna himself."

"What do you mean by that?" she demanded. And then, petulantly, she accused him of laughing at her, of refusing to take her seriously, of trying to be clever like the Wollastons.

"Look here, Paula," he said, and he put so much edge into his tone that she did, "have you ever spent five minutes out of the last five years trying to think what John was, besides your husband? I don't believe it. When I spoke of him to you, months ago, as a famous person you didn't know what I was talking about. He is. He's got a better chance—say to get into the next edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, than you have. He's got a career. He had it long before he knew you existed.—How old was he when he came to Vienna? About fifty, wasn't he?"

"Forty-nine," she said with the air of one making a serious contradiction; but her, "Oh, well,—" and a little laugh that followed it conceded that it was not.

"He'd had a career then for a long time," March went on. "He was established. He had things about as he wanted them. And then, out of nowhere, an irresistible thing like you came along and torpedoed him. He must have realized that he had gone clean out of his head about you. A man of that age doesn't fall in love unconsciously, nor easily either. He must have had frightful misgivings about persuading you to marry him. On your account as well as his own. Because he is that, you know. Conscientious, I mean. Almost to a morbid degree."

"Oh, yes," she conceded, "they're both like that. They spend half their time working things out trying to be fair."

He gave her a quick look, then came and sat down beside her again. "Well, then," he said, "we're on the right track. Just follow it along. You're the one big refractory thing in his life. The thing that constantly wants reconciling with something else,—at the same time that you're the delight of it, and the center and core of it. And while he's trying to deal with those problems justly, you know, he's taking on all of yours, too. He's trying to see things with your eyes, feeling them with your nerves, and since he's got a kind of uncanny penetration, I'd be willing to bet that he can tell you, half the time, what you're thinking about better than you could yourself. No wonder, between his conscience and his desire—your mutual desire—he's unreasonable. And since he's too old to be reformed out of his conscience that leaves the adjustment up to you."

"I don't know what more I can do," she said. "I've offered to give up everything."

"Yes," he said with a grunt, "that's it. I don't wonder he flew at you. That's the thing you'll have to give up!"

He rose and stood over her and thumped home, his point with one fist in the palm of the other hand. "Why, you've got to give up the nobility," he said. "The self-sacrificial attitude. You've got to chuck the heroine's rÔle altogether, Paula. That's what you've been playing, naturally enough. It makes good drama for you, but look where it leaves him! First you give up your career for him, and then you give him up for the career you've undertaken for his sake. You've contrived to put him in the wrong both ways. Oh, not meaning to, I know; just by instinct. Well, give that up. Give up the renunciatory gesture. Go to him and tell him the truth. That you want, in a perfectly human selfish way, all you can get, both of him and of a career. They aren't mutually exclusive really. It ought to be possible to have quite a lot of each."

"You think you know such a lot," she protested rebelliously, "but there's only one thing I want, just the same, and that's John, himself."

"No doubt that's true this afternoon," he admitted. "You sang Thais last night and several thousand people, according to this morning's paper, cheered you at the end of the second act. But I believe I can tell you your day-dream. It's to be the greatest dramatic soprano in the world—home for a vacation. With John and perhaps one or two small children of the affectionate age around you."

Her face flamed at that. "John has been talking about me this morning!" she cried.

He shook his head. "It was only a chance shot," he told her. "I'm sorry if it came close enough home to hurt. But there couldn't be a better day-dream than that and there's no reason I can see why it shouldn't come reasonably true, if you'll honestly try for as much of it as you can get. That's the prescription, anyhow. Give up nobility and all the heroic poses that go with it and practise a little enlightened selfishness instead. Perhaps by force of example you may persuade John Wollaston to abandon about half of his conscience. Then you would be settled."

With that he went back to his score and by no protest or expostulation could she provoke another word out of him. She fidgeted about the room for a quarter of an hour or so. Then with the announcement that she was going to dress, left it and went up-stairs.

When she came down a while later in street things and a hat she presented him with a new perplexity.

"I've been trying everywhere I can think of to get a car," she said, "and there simply isn't one to be had. I even tried to borrow one."

He asked her what she wanted of a car. Where she wanted to go.

"Oh, can't you see!" she cried, "I don't want to send for John again to come to me. I want to go to him. It's too maddening!"

"Well," he said, with a grin, "if you really want—desperately—to go to him, of course there's the trolley."

She stared at him for a moment and then perceiving, or thinking she perceived, something allegorical about the suggestion, she gave a laugh, swooped down and kissed him and went.