After a minute, she did. “Why,” she cried, lighting up, “he said he knew you but you wouldn’t remember him. He said you did an operation on his sister once—that saved her life.”
“An unmarried sister?” he asked.
“What difference ... Oh, I see, because if she was married her name wouldn’t be March. No, he didn’t say anything about that. He did say something, though, about a factory. You went out to the factory to see his father and he was there.”
John Wollaston’s face went blank for a minute and his eyelids drooped shut. Then a quick jerk of the head and a sharp expulsion of breath announced success. “That’s all right,” he said. “Thank the Lord, I’ve got it now.”
It would have seemed absurd to Paula, had she been capable of regarding anything he did in that light, that he should take a trivial matter like this so seriously. He couldn’t have looked more relieved over the successful finish of a difficult operation.
“That happens to be a case I’ll never forget,” he went on to explain. “Professionally speaking, it was unique, but it had points of human interest as well. The girl was a patient in one of the wards at the Presbyterian. I didn’t get a look at her until the last minute when it was desperate. Her father was opposed to the operation—a religious scruple, it turned out. Didn’t want God’s will interfered with. He was a workman, a skilled workman in a piano factory. There was no time to lose so I drove out there and got him; converted him on the way back to the hospital. I remember the son, now I think of it; by his speech, too. I remember thinking that the mother must have been a really cultivated woman. Well, it’s all right. I’ve got the address in the files at the office. I’ll send a letter there in the morning and enclose a check. How much ought it to be?”
Once more Paula did not know. Hadn’t, she protested, an idea; and when John asked her how much she paid Bernstein, she didn’t know that either. It all went on the bill.
“Well, that’s easy,” said John. “I’ve got last month’s bills in my desk. All right, I’ll look into it. You needn’t bother about it any more.”
An approximation to a sniff from Miss Wollaston conveyed the comment that Paula hadn’t bothered appreciably about it from the beginning, but neither of the others paid any attention to that.
As it fell out, John might have spared his labors because at eight o’clock or thereabouts the next morning just as he was sitting down to breakfast, Anthony March came back to repair his omission of the day before and tune the drawing-room piano.
A minor domestic detail of that sort would normally have fallen within Lucile’s province, but John decisively took it away from her.
“When I finish breakfast,” he said, “I’ll write him a check and take it in to him.” He added, “I’m curious to see what this new discovery of Paula’s looks like.”