Paula, of course, was, fundamentally, one of them.  It was remarkable how that simple discovery interpreted her.  When you saw her surrounded by them, working and quarreling with them, talking that horrible polyglot of French, Italian and English, which she slipped into so easily, you realized how exotic the environment of the Dearborn Avenue house must have been to her and how strong a thing her passion for John Wollaston, to enable her to endure five years of it,—­of finikin social observances,—­of Aunt Lucile’s standards of propriety!

Mary took real comfort in her companionship; found an immense release from emotional pressure in it.  One might quarrel furiously with Paula (and it happened Mary very nearly did, as shall be related presently, before they had been in the cottage three days), but one couldn’t possibly worry one’s self about her, couldn’t torture one’s self feeling things with Paula’s nerves.  That was the Wollaston trick.  What frightful tangles the thing that goes by the name of unselfishness, the attempt to feel for others, could lead a small group like a family into!

Another thing that helped was that during the fortnight of rehearsal before the season opened, there wasn’t time to think.  They were pelted by perfectly external events, a necessity for doing this, an appointment to do that, an engagement somewhere else.  It was like being caught out in a driving rain.  You scuttled along-snatched a momentary shelter where you could.

Even getting the clothes Paula needed would have filled the time of a woman of leisure to the brim.  A bridal trousseau would have been nothing to it.  But with Paula these activities had to be sandwiched in with daily rehearsals,—­long ones, too,—­hours with Novelli while she memorized half-forgotten parts, interviews with reporters, struggles with photographers, everything that the diabolic ingenuity of the publicity man could contrive.  He, by the way, regarded Paula as his best bet and lavished his efforts upon her in a way that stirred her colleagues (rivals, of course), to a frenzied exasperation, over his sinister partiality to this “society amateur.”

(They all but enjoyed a terrible revenge, for as poetic justice narrowly missed having it, the extent of her advance publicity and the beauty of her clothes proved to be the rocks she went aground on.  Only a lucky wave came along and floated her off again.)

Mary’s quarrel with Paula, though it never came off,—­never for that matter got through to Paula’s consciousness, even as an approach to one,—­had, all the same, a chain of consequences and so deserves to be recorded.  The opera management was supposed to supply Paula with a piano and they found one already installed in the Ravinia house when they moved in, a small grand of a widely advertised make.  Paula dug half a dozen vicious arpeggios out of it and condemned it out of hand.  Then in the midst of a petulant outburst which had, nevertheless, a humorous savor (the management would promise and pretend till kingdom come.  They’d even take real trouble to get out of complying with her simple request for a new piano), she pulled herself up short and stared at Mary.