Reacting from this irrational panic he tried to discount the whole thing.  March hadn’t lied, of course, but, being a lover, he had exaggerated.  As John sat over his breakfast he got to feeling quite comfortable about this.  His mind went back to the breakfast he had had with Mary at Ravinia —­breakfast after much such an abominable night as this last had been—­the breakfast they had left for that talk under the trees beside the lake.  And then his own words came back and stabbed him.

He had been arguing with her his right to extinguish himself if he chose.  He had said he had no religion real enough to make a valid denial of that right.  It was a question no one else could presume to decide.  How much more had he said to that sensitive nerve-drawn child of his?  He remembered how white she had gone for a moment, a little later.  And he had pretended not to see!  Just as he had been pretending, a few minutes back, to doubt the reality of the peril March had saved her from.  What a liar he was!

Sentimentality, March had quoted Mary as saying, was the cruelest thing in the world.  John stood convicted now of that cruelty toward his daughter.  Was he guilty of it, also, toward his wife?  Did their quarrel boil down to that?

CHAPTER XXVII

SETTLING PAULA

Anthony March might deny as much as he pleased that he was “enough of an Olympian to laugh” at life’s ironies, but it remained true that his God had a sense of humor and that March himself appreciated it.  When, well within that same twenty-four hours, a third member of the Wollaston family insisted upon telling him her troubles and asking him what she’d best do about them, he conceded with the flicker of an inward grin (not at all at the troubles which were serious enough nor at their sufferer who was in despair), that the great Disposer, having set out to demolish that philosophy, enjoyed making a thorough job of it.

It was about four o’clock on Sunday afternoon that he came to Paula’s cottage at Ravinia to get the score to The Outcry.  The maid who opened the door informed him that her mistress wasn’t at home, but when he told her what he wanted, and she had gone rather dubiously up-stairs to see about it, it was Paula herself who, after a wait of ten minutes or so, came down with the manuscript in her hand.

He was, perhaps, just the one person in the world she’d have come down to see.  All the explanation she volunteered to herself was that he didn’t matter.  It didn’t matter, this was to say, if he did perceive that she had been crying for days and days and looked an utter wreck.

And then his errand brought her a touch of comfort.  The acceptance of The Outcry for production restored the proprietary feeling she once had had about it.  She was the discoverer of The Outcry and if you’d asked her who was responsible for the revival of interest in it and for the fact that it was now to be produced, I think she’d have told you quite honestly that she was.  Hadn’t she asked them all to come to her house to hear it?  And sung the part of “Dolores” herself at that very informal audition?