She didn’t pretend though that this was the complete answer.  The reflective tone in which she spoke made it clear that there was more to it than that.

“Go on,” John said, “tell me the rest of it.  I think, perhaps, you understand her better than I do.”

Mary took her time about going on and she began a little doubtfully.  “I always begin by being unjust to Paula,” she said.  “That’s my instinct, I suppose, reproaching her for not doing what she would do if she were like me.  But afterward when I think her out, I believe I understand her pretty well.”

“Paula exaggerates,” she went on after another reflective pause.  “She must see things large in order to move among them in a large way.  Her gestures, those of her mind I mean, are—­sweeping.  If she weren’t so good-natured, our—­hair-splitting ways would annoy her.  Then it’s necessary for her to feel that she’s—­conquering something.”

That last word was barely audible and the quality of the silence which followed it drew John Wollaston’s gaze which had been straying over the lake, around to the speaker.  She had been occupying her hands while she talked, collecting tiny twigs and acorn cups that happened to be within reach but now she was tensely still and paler than her wont, he thought.

“You needn’t be afraid to say what’s in your mind,” he assured her.

“It wasn’t that,” she told him.  “I realized that I had been quoting somebody else.  Anthony March said once of Paula that if she had not been an artist she might have been a dompteuse.”

John settled himself more comfortably against his tree trunk.  A contact like this with his daughter’s mind must have been inexpressibly comforting to him after a night like the one he had just spent.  Its rectitude; its sensitiveness; the mere feel and texture of it, put his jangling nerves in tune.

“Is Ware the wild beast she has an inclination to tame in this instance?” he asked.

“He’s nothing but a symbol of it,” Mary said.  Then she managed to get the thing a little clearer.  “What she’d have done if she’d been like us and what we’d have had her do—­Mr. Whitney and Wallace and I,—­would have been to make a sort of compromise between her position as your wife and a career as Paula Carresford.  We’d have had her sign a contract to sing a few times this winter with the Metropolitan or the Chicago company, go on a concert tour perhaps for a few weeks, even give singing lessons or sing in a church choir.  That would probably have been Mr. Whitney’s idea.  Rather more than enough to pay her way and at the same time leave as much of her to you as possible.

“But that’s the last thing in the world it would be possible for Paula to do.  She must see a great career on one side,—­see herself as Geraldine Farrar’s successor,—­and on the other side she must see a perfect unflawed life with you.  So that whichever she chooses she will have a sense of making the greatest possible sacrifice.  She couldn’t have said to you what she did over the telephone if Mr. Ware hadn’t convinced her that a great career was open to her and she couldn’t have signed his contract if it had not involved sacrificing you.”