Was it the chance result of their preoccupation with other things that she had been given no more intelligible account of it, or was it something that all three of them, her father, Paula and Aunt Lucile, were walking round the edge of?  The nub of some seriously trivial quarrel?  Was that why Paula was so elaborately disengaged and Aunt Lucile so portentous?  Was it even perhaps why her father had so abruptly fled this morning without coming into the house?

She treated this surmise kindly.  It was something to think about anyhow; something to sharpen her wits upon, just as a cat stretches her claws in the nap of the drawing-room rug.  She rescued from oblivion half a dozen remarks heard during the morning, whose significance had gone over her head, and tentatively fitted them together like bits of a picture puzzle.  She hadn’t enough to go on but she believed there was something there.  And when a little later in the afternoon, she heard, along with a knock on her door, her aunt asking if she might come in, she gave her an enthusiastic welcome, scooped an armful of things out of a chair and cleared a sitting space for herself at the foot of the bed.

“Would this blue thing do for to-night?” she asked, “or isn’t it enough of an affair?  What sort of party is it anyhow?”

“Goodness knows,” said Lucile.  “Between your father and Paula I find it rather upsetting.”

Mary had reached out negligently for her cigarette case, lighted one and letting it droop at a rather impossible angle, supported by the lightest pressure of her lips so that the smoke crept up over her face into her lashes and her hair, folded her hands demurely in her lap and waited for her aunt to go on.  She was mischievously half aware of the disturbing effect of this sort of thing upon Lucile.

“What has there been between them?” Mary asked, when it became clear that her aunt needed prompting.  “Between father and Paula, I mean.  Not a row?”

Mary never used language like this except provocatively.  It worked on her aunt as she had meant it to.

“There has been nothing between them,” she said, “that requires a rowdy word like that to express.  It has not been even a quarrel.  But they have been for the last day or two, a little—­at ...”

“Outs?” Mary suggested.

This had been the word on Lucile’s tongue.  “At cross purposes,” she amended and paused again.  But Mary seeing that she was fairly launched waited, economically, meanwhile, inhaling all the smoke from her cigarette.  “I suppose after all, it’s quite natural,” Lucile began, “that Paula should attract geniuses, since she’s rather by way of being one herself.”

Mary took the cigarette in her fingers so that she could speak a little more crisply than was possible around it.  “Who is the genius she’s attracting now?  Doesn’t father like him?  And is he being not asked to the party?  I’m sorry, aunt, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”