As for Wallace Hood, one look at him sitting there, as unresponsive to the spell as the cup from which he was sipping its third replenishment of tea, would have explained his domestication in that household;—­the necessity, in fact, for domesticating among them some one who was always buoyantly upon the surface, whose talk, in comfortably rounded sentences, flowed along with a mild approximation to wit, whose sentiments were never barbed with passion;—­who was, to sum him up in one embracing word, appropriate.

Mary, in addition to feeling repentant over her outbreak just before Paula came in, experienced a sort of gratitude to him for being able to sit squarely facing the sofa, untroubled by the absent thoughtful face and the figure a little languorously disposed that confronted him.  His bright generalities were addressed to her as much as to the rest of them; his smile asked the same response from her and nothing more.

Nothing short of an explosion that shattered all their surfaces at once could have got a single vibration out of him.  By that same token, when the explosion did occur, he was the most helpless person there, the only one of them who could really be called panic-stricken.

John had, at last, crossed the room and seated himself beside his wife.  He spoke to her in a low voice but her full-throated reply was audible everywhere in the room.

“No, I’m not tired and I really don’t want any tea.  I’ve gone slack on purpose because that’s how I want to be till nine o’clock.  I’ve just eaten an enormous oyster stew with Rush.  That’s what we waited for.”

John frowned.  “My dear, you’ll have ruined your appetite for dinner.”

“I hope so,” she said, “because I’m not to have any.”

At that, from the other two men, there began an expostulatory—­“No dinner!” “You don’t mean ...!” but it was silenced by John’s crisp—­“You’re planning not to come down to dinner, then?”

“Oh, I’ll come down,” said Paula, “and I’ll sit.  But I don’t mean to eat anything.  Unless you think that will be too much like a—­what is it?—­skeleton at the feast.”

“I think it would seem somewhat-exaggerated,” he said.

“Well,” Paula retorted, drawing the rest of the room into it again just as Wallace was making a gallant effort to start a subsidiary conversation to serve as a screen, “that’s because you haven’t heard those songs.  If there’s a singer in the world who’d dare—­cut loose with them right after eating the sort of dinner Lucile will have to-night for Mary and Rush, I’d like to see him try it.”

“I didn’t mean to imply that they were not difficult.  I dare say they are all but impossible.  But it does seem to me that you are taking the occasion of singing them—­a little too—­emotionally.”

The tone he was trying for was meant to have nothing in it—­for other ears than hers, at least, beyond mere good-humored remonstrance.  But her reply tore all pretense aside.  She let him have it straight.