For anything that bore upon the obtainability of his service for the Ravinia piano the telephone conversation would have done as well.  His mother had seen him for only a short time, a little more than a week ago and judged from what he then said that he was upon the point of going away, though not for a long absence—­a month, perhaps.  She had not asked where he meant to go and he had volunteered nothing.  It was possible that he did not know himself.

Mary remained in doubt, for the first five minutes or so of her call, whether the stiff guarded precision of this was a mark of hostility to the whole Wollaston clan or whether it was nothing but undiluted New England reserve.  She ventured a tentative, “I suppose he didn’t say especially why he was going,” and on getting a bare negative in reply, went on, a little breathlessly:—­“I didn’t mean that impertinently;—­only all of us were very much interested in him and we liked him too well, especially father and I, to be content to lose track of him.  I hope he wasn’t ill;—­didn’t go away because of that.”

“He told me that he was not,” Mrs. March answered.  “Though if I might have had my way with him, I would have put him to bed for a week.  However,” she added, with a fine smile, “I never did have my way with him and neither has his father had his.  And I judge it to be as well that we have not.”

No, there was no hostility about it.  She perceived the genuineness in her visitor’s concern and was perhaps really touched by it.  But even so she was sparing of details.  Anthony had never lived a life regulated by rule and habit.  He worked at his music much too hard when the call, as she termed it, was upon him, and obviously quite forgot to take proper care of himself.  And then he went away, as on this occasion, to recuperate in his own manner.

Mary adventured again just as she was getting up to take her leave.  “It must want a good courage,” she said, “to let him go like that; not to keep trying, at least, to hold him back in sheltered ways.”

She got a nod of acknowledgment of the truth of this, but no words at all.  But she found herself, afterward, in possession of an impression so clear that one would think it must have needed a long exchange of unreserved confidences to have produced it.  The man’s mother loved him, of course; one might take that for granted.  And was proud of him; of course—­perhaps—­again.  But beyond all that, she rejoiced in him; in his emancipation from the line and precept which had so tightly confined her; in his very vagabondage.

She was not much in his confidence, though.  Mary had made that out from the way she had received her own resume of the status of his opera.  His mother had known nothing of his hopes, neither when Paula raised them up nor later when she cast them down.  It was odd about that—­and rather pitiable.  She would have welcomed her son’s confidences, Mary was sure, with so real a sympathy, if he could only have believed it.  But the crust of family tradition was too thick, she supposed, to make even the attempt possible.