“Life’s a kaleidoscope,” Mary said.  “I’m tired.  Let’s sit down.”—­They were half-way up the park by that time.—­“Oh, here on the grass.  What does it matter?” When they were thus disposed she went back to her figure.  “There’s just a little turn, by some big wrist that we don’t know anything about, and a little click, and the whole pattern changes.”

“There are some patterns that don’t change,” he said soberly, but he didn’t try to argue the point with her.  He knew too exactly how she felt.  “Tell me,” he said, “what it was that you wanted to talk to me about.”

She acknowledged that she’d been hoping he’d forgotten that, of the momentousness of his two items of news had left her, as her talk about kaleidoscopes indicated, rather disoriented.  So he threw in, to give her time to get round to it, the information that both Sylvia and the little Williamson girl had decided they wanted to study music with him.  “I agreed,” he added, “to take them on, when I got around to it.”

“Tony,” she said, “I won’t let you do that.  Not music lessons to little girls.  I won’t.”

“Afternoons?” he asked gently.  “When I’m through the real day’s work?  It would be pretty good fun, trying to show a few people—­young unspoiled people—­what music really is.  Dynamite some of their sentimental ideas about it; shake them loose from some of the schoolmasters’ niggling rules about it; make them write it themselves; show ’em the big shapes of it; make a piano keyboard something they knew their way about in.  That wouldn’t be a contemptible job for anybody.—­Oh, well, we can talk that out later.  But you needn’t be afraid for me, my dear.”

“That’s what I said to Wallace Hood,” she told him; “just before lunch.  When I was trying to decide to tell you what he’d been saying.—­About your room that they’re turning you out of.”

With that, she repeated the whole of the talk with Wallace and the serio-fantastic idea that it had led up to.

He grinned over it a while in silence, then asked, “Are you willing to leave it entirely to me?”

“Of course,” she said.

“Well, then,” he decided, “if I’ve still got that paper—­and I think I have ...  I copied it, I remember, out of an old law-book, and to satisfy Luigi’s passion for the picturesque and the liturgical we took it to a notary and got it sealed with a big red wafer—­Well, if I’ve got it and it’s any good, I’ll let Aldrich,—­is that his name?—­make what he can of it.  I’ll square it with Luigi afterward of course.”

“It’s a compromise for you,” she said gravely.  “You wouldn’t have done that two weeks ago.”

He laughed.  “Folks use the word uncompromising as if it were always a praiseworthy thing to be.  But it hardly ever is, if you stop to think.  Certainly if life’s an art, like composing music or painting pictures, then compromise is in the very fabric of it.  Getting different themes or colors that would like to be contradictory, to work together; developing a give and take.  What’s the important thing?  To have a life that’s full and good and serviceable, or to mince along through it with two or three sacred attitudes?—­Wait a minute.”