“He is being asked which, it appears, is what Paula objects to; only not until after dinner.  That she insisted upon.  Really,” she went on, in response to her niece’s perplexed frown, “I shall be much more intelligible If you’ll let me begin at the beginning.”

“Please do,” said Mary.  “Where did Paula find him?”

“I found him,” said Miss Wollaston.  “Paula discovered him a little later.  I found him on a bench in the park and told him he might come to tune the drawing-room piano.  Paula had him tune her piano instead and spent what must have been a rather mad day with him over it.  He brought round some songs the next day for her to try and she and Portia Stanton’s husband have been practising them with hardly any intermission since.  The idea was that when they had ‘got them up’ as they say, the man,—­March his name is, Anthony March, I think,—­should be invited round to hear Paula sing them.  Paula insists, absurdly it seems to me, that he never has heard a note of them himself; that he can’t even play them upon the piano.  How he could compose them without playing them on the piano first, is beyond me.  But she is inclined to be a little emotional, I think, over the whole episode.  Quite naturally—­even Paula can’t deny that—­your father thought he would like to be present when the songs were sung and it was arranged that it should be this evening.”

“She may not have been able to deny that it was natural,” Mary observed, “but I’d bet she didn’t like it.”

“It’s only fair to Paula to say,” Miss Wollaston insisted, “that she did nothing to exhibit a feeling of that sort.  But when, at John’s suggestion, I spoke of the possibility of having in the Cravens and the Blakes,—­the Cravens are very musical, you know—­and Wallace Hood who would be really hurt if we left him out, Paula came nearer to being downright rude than she often allows herself to be.  She said among other things that she didn’t propose to have March subjected to a ‘suffocating’ affair like that.  She said she wanted him free to interrupt as often as he liked and tell them how rotten they were.  That was her phrase.  When I observed that Mr. March didn’t impress me as the sort of person who could conceivably wish to be rude as that she said he could no more remember to be polite when he heard those songs for the first time than she herself could sing them in corsets.  She summed it up by saying that it wasn’t going to be a polite affair and the fewer polite people there were, hanging about, the better.  There was, naturally, nothing I could say to that.”

“I should think not,” Mary agreed, exhaling rather explosively an enormous cloud of smoke.  “Poor Aunt Lucile!” Her commiseration didn’t sound more than skin deep.

“The matter rested there,” the elder woman went on, “until your father received Rush’s telegram that you were coming to-day.  Then he took matters into his own hands and gave me a list of the people he wanted asked.  There are to be about a dozen besides ourselves at dinner and perhaps as many more are to come after.”