“Shall I come up?” Mary asked.

“Come along,” Paula answered.  “I’m not asleep or anything and besides I want to talk to you.”

“I think I got everything you want,” Mary said from Paula’s doorway, “or if not exactly, what will do just about as well.”

Paula, stretched out on the bed rather more than half undressed, with the contented languor of a well fed lioness yet with some passion or other smoldering in her eyes, made no pretense at being interested in Mary’s success in executing her commissions.

“I had Max to lunch to-day,” she said.  “I knew you hated him and then it was complicated enough anyway.  I suppose it might have been better if I’d told you so right out instead of making up all those things for you to do in town, but I couldn’t quite find the words to put it in somehow and I had to have it out with him.  He’s been nagging at me for a week and he’s going away to-morrow.  He’s given me until then to think it over.”

There was no use trying to hurry Paula.  Mary took off her hat, lighted a cigarette and settled herself in the room’s only comfortable chair before she asked, “Think what over?”

“Oh, the whole thing,” said Paula.  “What he’s been harping on for the last week.—­He is a loathsome sort of beast,” she conceded after a little pause.  “But he’s right about this.  Absolutely.”

Was her father ever fretted, Mary wondered, by this sort of thing?  Did his nerves draw tight, and his muscles, too, waiting for the idea behind these perambulations to emerge?

“I can imagine a lot of things that Mr. Maxfield Ware would be right about,” she observed.  “Which one is this?”

“About me,” said Paula.  “About what I’d have to do if I wanted to get anywhere.  He thinks I’ve a good chance to get into the very first class, along with Garden and Farrar and so on.  And unless I can do that, there’s no good going on.  I’d never be happy as a second rater.  Well, that’s true.  And my only chance of getting to the top, he says, is in being managed just right.  I guess that’s true, too.  He says that if I take this Metropolitan contract that LaChaise has been talking about, go down to New York as one of their ‘promising young American sopranos’ to sing on off-nights and fill in and make myself generally useful, I simply won’t have a chance.  They wouldn’t get excited about me whatever happened.  They’d go on patronizing me and yawning in my face no matter how good I was.  I’d do just as well, he says, so far as my career is concerned, to stay right here in Chicago and get Campanini to give me two or three appearances a season;—­make a sort of amateur night of it for the gold coast to buzz about.  I’d have a lot easier time that way and it would come to the same thing in the end.  And he says that unless I want to go in for his scheme, that’s what I’d better do.  Well, and he’s right.  I can see that, plainly enough.”

Mary refrained from asking what Max’s scheme was.  She’d learn, no doubt, in her stepmother’s own good time.  She nodded a tentative assent to Max’s general premises and waited.