“What idiots we are!  I am, anyhow.  I’d forgotten all about March.  He can make a piano out of anything.  When he’s tuned this, I won’t want another.  I’ve got his telephone number somewhere.  You don’t happen to remember it, do you?—­Why?  What makes you look like that?”

For Mary was staring at her—­speechless.  Paula’s affairs had driven her own pretty well out of her mind.  She had stopped thinking about Graham.  She’d given over worrying about Rush.  But she had not forgotten Anthony March.  The alternative possibility that Paula might have gone on with his opera, that he might have been, but for what her father spoke of as rough justice, attending rehearsals of it, hearing that big orchestra making a reality of its unheard melodies, had been much in her mind.  She had wondered whether it was not really in Paula’s.  Along with a regret for his downcast hopes.  He was, in a way, the ladder she had climbed by.  Hearing her sing those wonderful songs of his was what had led LaChaise to offer her this opportunity.  And Paula didn’t know, Mary was sure, of anything that mitigated his disappointment.  To her, he was merely one who had tried and, pitiably, failed.  She must, it seemed, have felt sorry about it and Mary had considerately avoided all reference to him.

Now it appeared that Paula had blankly forgotten all about him.  Remembered him only when she wanted him to tune the piano.  She callously proposed to exact this service of him, and if possible, over the telephone!

“I suppose,” Mary said, when she had found her voice, “that I look the way I feel.  Paula, you wouldn’t do that!”

“Why not?” Paula demanded.  And then with a laugh, “I wouldn’t forget to pay him this time.  And it would be nice to see him again, too.  Because I really liked him a lot.”

“Well, if you do like him, you wouldn’t, would you, want to do anything—­cruel to him?  Anything that he might take as—­a willful insult?  Because it could be taken like that, I should think.”

She spoke with a good deal of effort.  Paula’s surprise, the incredulous way she had echoed the word cruel, the fact that there was still an unshaken good humor in the look of curiosity that she directed upon her stepdaughter, all but overwhelmed Mary with a sudden wave of helpless anger.

What could one do with a selfishness as insolent as that?  What was there to say?

Paula got up, still looking at her in that puzzled sort of way, came over to her chair, sat down on the arm of it and took her by the shoulders.

“You’re trembling!” she said.  “I suspect I am working you too hard.  You mustn’t let me do that, you know.  John will never forgive me if I do.  Why, about March, did you mean because I wouldn’t sing his opera?  He knew all the time I wouldn’t unless he could get it right.  And he knew he wasn’t getting it right.  He wanted to give it up long before he did, only I wouldn’t let him.  But as for being insulted, bless you, he isn’t like that.  And perhaps if he came I could get him all the pianos out here to keep in tune.  There must be dozens!”