But she got no further.  The plea for comprehension, for an ear that would not turn away from her plain story, never was made.  In a smother of words he halted her.  Affectionately, with a gentleness that achieved absolute finality.  She was overwrought.  She carried paradox too far.  In her innocence she used a form of speech that she didn’t know the meaning of, and should be careful to avoid.  Her troubles, with patience, would work themselves out in the end.  Meanwhile let her as far as possible stop thinking about them.

But she had got, during the intaken breath before he began to speak, a sensation,—­as sharp and momentary as the landscape revealed in a lightning flash,—­of a sudden terror on his part; as of one finding himself on the edge of an abyss of understanding.  For that one glaring instant before he had had time to turn his face away he had known what she meant.  But he never would look again.  Never would know.

CHAPTER XVI

FULL MEASURE

Ravinia is one of Chicago’s idiosyncrasies, a ten-weeks’ summer season of grand opera with a full symphony orchestra given practically out-of-doors.  Its open pavilion seats from fifteen hundred to two thousand people and on a warm Saturday night, you will find twice as many more on the, “bleachers” that surround it or strolling about under the trees in the park.  The railroad runs special trains to it all through the season from town, and crammed and groaning interurbans collect their toll for miles from up and down the shore.

It had begun as an amusement park with merry-go-rounds, Ferris-wheels and such—­to the scandalized indignation of numerous super-urban persons whose summer places occupied most of the district roundabout.  They took the enterprise into their own hands, abolished the calliope, put a symphony orchestra into the bandstand and, eventually, transformed the shell into a stage and went in for opera; opera popularized with a blue pencil so that no performance was ever more than two hours long, and at the modest price of fifty cents.

Its forces, recruited chiefly from among the younger stars at the Metropolitan, give performances that want no apologetic allowance from anybody.  It has become an institution of which the town and especially the North Shore is boastful.

Paula foresaw no easy conquest here.  Her social prestige, part of which she enjoyed as John Wollaston’s wife and part of which she had earned during the last four years for herself, counted as much against her as it did in her favor.  It was evident from the way the announcements of her prospective appearance at Ravinia had been elaborated in the society columns of the newspapers that it would arouse a lot of curiosity.  It would be one of the topics that everybody, in the social-register sense of the word, would be talking about and in order to talk authoritatively everybody—­four or five hundred people this is to say—­would have to attend at least one of her performances.