her dressing-room or in the wings chatting sometimes with other members of the force whom she found it possible to get acquainted with; occasional incursions into the front of the house to note how something went or, more simply, just to hear something she liked; driving Paula home again at last, undressing her; having supper with her—­the most substantial meal of the day—­talking it over with her; and so, like Mr. Pepys—­to bed.

It might shock Wallace Hood, a schedule like that, but there were days when to Mary it was a clear God-send.

She decided within the first twenty-four hours to wait for some sort of lead from Paula before plunging into a discussion of her father’s affairs.  It would take the edge off if the thing weren’t too glaringly premeditated.  Paula just now was doing all she could.  Mary opened all her mail and would know if any offer came in that involved future plans.  She accepted the respite gratefully.

She had a use to put it to.  For the first two or three days after her return, she had not been able to turn to anything that associated itself with Anthony March without such an emotional disturbance as prevented her from thinking at all.  The mere physical effect of those sheets of score paper was, until she could manage to control it, such as to make any continuance of the labor of translating his opera, impossible.

By a persistent effort of will she presently got herself in hand however and went on not only with her translation but with the other moves in her campaign to get The Outcry produced.  Her first thought was that something might be accomplished directly through LaChaise.  Her simple plan had been to make friends with him so that when she urged the arguments for producing this work, they’d be—­well—­lubricated by his liking for her.

She began saying things to him on a rather more personal note, things with a touch of challenge in them.  There was no gradual response to this but suddenly—­a week or ten days after her return from Hickory Hill this was—­he seemed to perceive her drift.  He turned a look upon her, the oddest sort of look, startled, inquiring, lighted up with a happy though rather incredible surmise.  It was an exclamatory look which one might interpret as saying, “What’s this!  Do you really mean it!”

Mary got no further than that.  She didn’t mean it, of course, a serious love-affair with LaChaise, and she tried for a while to feel rather indignant against an attitude toward women which had only two categories; did she offer amorous possibilities or not.  An attitude that had no half lights in it, no delicate tints of chivalry nor romance.  LaChaise would do nothing for the sake of her blue eyes.  He had no interest whatever in that indeterminate, unstable emotional compound that goes, between men and women, by the name of friendship.

She tried to call this beastly and feel indignant about it, but somehow that emotion didn’t respond.  She had more real sympathy for and understanding of an attitude like that than she had for one like Graham’s.  It was simpler and more natural.  It involved you in no such labyrinths of farfetched absurdities and exasperating cross-purposes as Graham’s did.