She made no immediate reply, but not long afterward she asked if she might not go away without waiting for Paula’s return.  “It would be too difficult, don’t you think?—­for the three of us, in a small house like this.”

He agreed with manifest relief.  He asked if it was not too late to drive that afternoon to Hickory Hill, but she said she’d prefer to go by train anyhow.  That was possible she thought.

He did not ask, in so many words, if this was where she meant to go.  There was no other place for her that he could think of.

CHAPTER XXI

THE SUBSTITUTE

It was a good guess of Mary’s that Paula had gone to borrow the twenty thousand dollars but it was to Wallace Hood, not to Martin Whitney, that she went for it; and thereby illustrated once more how much more effective instinct is than intelligence.

Martin, rich and generous as he was, originator as he was of the edict that Paula must go to work, would never have been stampeded as Wallace was in a talk that lasted less than half an hour, into producing securities to the amount that Paula needed and offering them up in escrow for the life of Maxfield Ware’s contract.

Wallace was only moderately well off and he was by nature, cautious.  His investments were always of the most conservative sort.  This from habit as well as nature because his job—­the only one he had ever had—­was that of estate agent.  But Paula’s instinct told her that he wouldn’t find it possible to refuse.  I think it told her too, though this was a voice that did not make itself fairly heard to her conscious ear, that he would be made very fluttered and unhappy by it whether he granted her request or not.

What he would hate, she perceived, was the suddenness of the demand and the irrevocable committal to those five years; the blow it was to those domesticities and proprieties he loved so much.  The fact that he would be made sponsor for those unchartered excursions to Mexico, to South America, and so on, under the direction of a libidinous looking cosmopolite like Maxfield Ware.

Why she wanted to put Wallace into the flutters she couldn’t have told.  She was, as I say, not quite aware that she did.  But he had been running up a score in very minute items that was all of five years old.  The fact that all these items went by the name of services, helpful little acts of kindness, made the irritation they caused her all the more acute.

I don’t agree with Lucile Wollaston’s diagnosis, that Paula could not abide Wallace merely because he refused to lose his head over her, but there was a grain of truth in it.  What she unconsciously resented was the fundamental unreality of his attitude to her.  Actually, he did not like her, but the relation he had selected as appropriate to the first Mrs. Wollaston’s successor was one of innocent devotion and he stuck, indefatigably, to the pose.  So the chance to put his serviceability to the proof in consternating circumstances like these, afforded her a subtle satisfaction.  He’d brought it upon himself, hadn’t he?  At least it was he and no other who had put Mary up to the part she had played.