She waited contentedly enough, watching him with a misty smile as he lay upon the grass beside her wrestling with his idea.

“All right,” he said presently.  “Here’s the test that I’ll agree to.  I’ll agree to do things or to leave them undone, to the end that when I’m—­sixty, say, I’ll have packed more of real value into my life—­my life as your husband and the father of your children—­than that vagabond you’re so concerned about would have had in his if—­if ...”

“If I hadn’t gone to him a week ago last night?” She said it steadily enough, where he could not say it at all.

“Yes,” he said.  “That’s what I mean.”

He reached out for her hand and she gave it to him.  Presently his face brightened once more into a grin.  “I’ll even promise to write more music.  Lord, if I’ve really got anything, you couldn’t stop me.  Come along.  Father and mother will be looking for us before very long now.”

The critics agreed that the premiere of March’s opera was a “distinct success,” and then proceeded to disagree about everything else.  The dean of the corps found it somewhat too heavily scored in the orchestra and the vocal parts rather ungrateful, technically.  The reactionary put up his regular plaintive plea for melody but supposed this was too much to ask, these days.  The chauvinist detected German influence in the music (he had missed the parodic satire in March’s quotations), and asked Heaven to answer why an American composer should have availed himself of a decadent French libretto.

The audience showed a friendly bias toward it at the beginning and were plainly moved by the dramatic power of it as it progressed, but they seemed shocked and bewildered by the bludgeon blows of the conclusion and the curtain fell upon a rather panicky silence.  Then they rallied and gave both the performers and the composer what would pass in current journalese for an ovation.

The Wollastons’ friends, who were out in pretty good force, crowded forward to be introduced to Mary’s fiance and to offer him their double congratulations.  They found him rather unresponsive and decided that he was temperamental (a judgment which did him no serious disservice with most of them), though the kindlier ones thought he might be shy.  Mary herself found something not quite accountable in his manner, but she forbore to press for an explanation and let him off, good-humoredly enough, from the little celebration of his triumph which she had had in mind.

The fact was that he had come through the experience, which no one who has not shared it with him can possibly understand, of discovering the enormous difference between the effect of a thing on paper, or even in its last rehearsal, and the effect of it when it is performed before an audience which has paid to see it.  It was no wonder he was dazed, for the opera he found himself listening to seemed like a changeling.

He worked all night over it and told LaChaise the next morning that he had made serious alterations in it and would need more rehearsals.  The opera had been billed in advance for a repetition on the following Saturday night, the understanding among the powers being that if it failed to get a sufficient measure of favor the bill should be changed.  It was touch and go, but the final decision was that it should have another chance.