But oddly enough, she felt herself going back to still older times, to the abominable little girl who had yielded to irresistible desires such as making faces at him and rubbing the nap of his silk hat the wrong way.  She repressed, vigorously, this lawless vein.  She was determined for this one day to be just as nice as he tried, so hard, to think she was.  But with this resolution occupying her mind the talk presently ran rather thin, her contribution to it for whole minutes drying up entirely.  It was after a rather blank silence that he said he supposed Paula was lying down, resting for to-night’s performance.  His inflection struck Mary as a little too casual and reminded her that it was his first mention of her stepmother’s name.  This roused her attention.

“Oh, Paula’s off playing with Rush,” she said.  “I believe they went to a matinee.”

He exclaimed at that, over Paula’s stores of energy and her reckless ways of spending them.  He said she gave him the impression of being absolutely tireless, superimposing a high speed society existence which John Wollaston and he, in relays, could hardly keep up with, upon the heavy routine of work in her studio.  He illustrated this with a schedule of her activities during the last three days.  “Oh, yes,” he threw in, in parenthesis, “I’m as much in the family as ever.  When your father can’t do escort duty, they call on me.”  He added in conclusion that he was glad she had already made a start toward getting acquainted with Rush.

Was this relief, Mary wondered—­at learning that she was not at this moment engaged less domestically somewhere with Anthony March?  But she doubted whether this was a good guess.  If he did feel any such relief, it was not, at all events, from a personal jealousy; for the illuminating conviction had come over her that Wallace could not possibly be one of Paula’s conquests.  A man still capable of cherishing as the most beautiful event of his life, that sentimental platonic friendship he had enjoyed with her mother, would be immune against Paula’s spells.

She wondered if he wasn’t a little afraid of Paula.  If he did not, in his heart, actually dislike her.  But if this were true, why did he willingly devote so many of his hours to squiring her about, substituting for her husband? (She told herself, as one discovering a great truth, that a substitute was exactly what Heaven had ordained Wallace Hood to be.) She kept him going about Paula easily enough, as a sort of obbligato to these meditations and her name was on Wallace’s lips when John Wollaston came into the room.

“Where is she?” he asked Mary.  “I hoped I’d find her resting for to-night.”  Evidently he had been up to her room to see.  The relief was plainly legible in his face when he got Mary’s answer.

“She and Rush, eh,” he said.  “I’m glad they’ve made a start together, but they ought to be back by now.  They drove, didn’t they?”

She couldn’t inform him as to that and by way of getting him to come to anchor, offered him his tea.