Well, it had been short-lived, that little triumph of hers.  It had stopped against a blank wall just when the car stopped under the ports cochere of the Dearborn Avenue house.  John’s arm which had been around her was withdrawn and he looked with just a touch of ostentation at his watch.  She knew before he spoke that when he did, his tone would ring flat.  The old spell was broken.  He was once more under the dominion of the newer, stronger one.

“I’m terribly late,” he said.  “I must drive straight along to the hospital.  I’ll see you to-night.  We’re having a few old friends in to dinner.  Run along now.  Your Aunt Lucile will be waiting for you.”

His omission to mention Paula had been fairly palpable.  Her reply, “All right, dad, till to-night, then. Au ’voir” had been, she knew, as brittle and sharp-edged as a bit of broken glass.  It had cut him;—­she had meant it to.

Well it served her right.  Paula deserved to own the stronger spell.  Paula’s emotional channels were open and deep.  No choking snags and sandbars, no perverse eddies in them.  Look at her with Rush to-day!  There was a situation that fairly bristled with opportunities for blundering.  She might, with this grown-up son of her husband’s whom she had hardly seen, have shown herself shy, embarrassed, at a loss how to take him.  She might have tried to be archly maternal with him or elder-sisterly.  But she played up none of these sentimental possibilities, seemed, indeed, serenely unaware of them.  She treated him just as she had always treated Mary—­as a contemporary.  From the beginning she had no trouble making him talk.  For one thing her acquaintance with France and Germany was intimate enough to enable her to ask him questions which he found it pleasantly stimulating to try to answer.  As she felt her way to firmer ground with him, she allowed what was evidently a perfectly spontaneous affection to irradiate the look she turned upon him and to warm her lovely voice.

So she must have begun—­as simply and irresistibly as that—­in Vienna!

Mary tried hard to think of it as a highly skillful performance, but this was an attitude she could not maintain.  It was not a performance at all; it was—­just Paula, who, having taken her father away from her was now, inevitably, going to take her brother too.  Not because she meant to—­quite unconscious that she was doing any harm ("and of course she isn’t, except to a cat like me")—­that was the maddening, and at the same time, endearing thing about her.

For there was a broad impartiality about her spell that tugged at Mary even while she forlornly watched Rush yielding to it.  And the way it affected Aunt Lucile was simply funny.  She melted, visibly, like a fragment left on the curb by the iceman, whenever Paula—­turned the current on.  What made this the more striking was that Aunt Lucile’s normal mood to-day impressed Mary as rather aggressively