He was being just as nice to her as possible.  By his old-fashioned standards, no hotel was a proper place for a young girl to spend a night in alone.  Yet beyond offering two alternative suggestions, he forbore trying to dissuade her.  So when he chose the Saddle and Cycle as their anchorage for the evening, she endorsed his choice with the best appearance of enthusiasm she could muster, though she’d rather have gone to a place where three out of four of the other diners wouldn’t in all probability be known to her.

Arriving, however, in the unclassified hour between tea and dinner, they found they had the place pretty much to themselves and settled down in a secluded angle of the veranda for a leisurely visit.  They began on Paula, of course, her retrieved failure and her sensational success.  How sorry Wallace was not to have been there for her “Nedda.” (He didn’t go in much for Sunday entertainments of any sort, Mary remembered.) Well, it had been just as splendid as everybody said it was.  That was one thing, at any rate, that had been put beyond discussion.  Even the pundits were, for the moment anyhow, silenced.

He was curious as to how the intimate details of this strange life she had a chance to observe, struck her.  How she liked Paula’s colleagues; to what extent the glamour evaporated when one was behind the scenes.

She satisfied him as well as she could, though her opportunities, she said, were a good deal narrower than he took them to be.  She had, herself, so much to do as Paula’s factotem that there wasn’t much leisure for loafing about.  And this launched her into a humorously exaggerated account of what was involved in being secretary, chauffeur and chaperon to a successful opera star.  But she pulled up when she saw he was taking it seriously.

“It’s shocking she should work you like that,” he said in a burst of undisguised indignation.  “Of course, it’s precisely what Paula would do.  She has very little common consideration, I’m afraid, for anybody.”

Mary could not remember having heard him speak like that, in all the years she’d known him, of anybody; she was sure he never had so spoken of any one who bore the name of Wollaston.  Taken aback as she was she changed her tune altogether and tried to reassure him.

“But that’s what I’m there for, Wallace dear!  To be worked.  And you’ve no idea how I like having something to do which amounts, in a small way, to a job.”

“It’s too hard for you, though,” he persisted.  “It isn’t what you were trained for.  And it’s rather, as I said,—­shocking.  If it was all understood from the first, then so much the worse for the understanding.  I hope your father, when he went up there, didn’t discover what your duties were supposed to be.”

“No,” Mary said rather dryly, “I don’t believe he did.”

“Well,” he said thoughtfully, at the end of a short silence, “I am profoundly thankful that she’s made so—­solid a success.”