John didn’t follow that very closely.  His mind was still upon the last sentence of March’s former speech.  “It’s not an experience she can safely go through again.”  What did he mean by that?  How much did he mean by that?  Would John, if he could, plumb the full depth of that meaning?  There was no use fighting any longer.

“The simplest way of stating the fact, I suppose,” he said, “is that you two mean to marry and that you’re satisfied that your reasons for making the decision are valid.  Well, if Mary corroborates you, as I have no doubt she will, I’ll face that fact as realistically as possible.  I’ll agree not to, as you put it, sentimentalize.”

Then he got up and held out his hand.  “I mean that for a better welcome that it sounds,” he concluded.  And if there was no real feeling of kindliness for his prospective son-in-law behind the words, there was what came to the same thing, a realization that this feeling was bound to come in time.  No candid-minded person could keep alive, for very long, a grievance against Anthony March.

The physician in him spoke automatically while their hands were gripped.  “Good lord, man!  You’re about at the end of your rope.  Exhausted—­that’s what I mean.  How long is it since you’ve fed?”

March was vague about this; wouldn’t be drawn into the line John had been diverted into.  He answered another question or two of the same tenor with half his mind and finally said—­with the first touch of impatience he had betrayed, “I’m all right!  That can wait.  There’s one more thing I want to say before you talk to Mary.”

He seemed grateful for John’s permission to sit down again, dropped into his chair in a way that suggested he might have fallen into it in another minute, and took the time he visibly needed for getting his wits into working order again.

“I think I can see how the prospect must look to you,” he began.  “The difficulties and objections that you see are, I guess, the same ones that appeared to me.  The fact that I’m not in her world, at all.  That I’ve never even tried to succeed nor get on, nor even to earn a decent living.  And that, however hard I work to change all that, it will only be by perfectly extraordinary luck if I can contrive to make a life for her that will be—­externally anywhere near as good a life as the one she’s always taken for granted.

“It won’t be as much worse, though, as you are likely to think.  With the help she’ll give me I shall be able to earn a decent living.  Unless that opera of mine fails—­laughably, and I don’t believe it will, up at Ravinia, it will help quite a lot.  Make it possible for me to get some pupils in composition.  And I know I can write some songs that will be publishable and singable—­for persons who aren’t musicians like Paula.  I did write two or three for the boys in Bordeaux that went pretty well.  That sort of thing didn’t seem worth while to me then and I never went on with it.