“Why?” Mary made the word rather crisply.

“Oh, well,” Rush explained uncomfortably, “you know what it had begun to look like.  Paula quarreling with father about him and not going down to dinner; and—­cutting loose like that over his music.  But of course there couldn’t be anything of that sort—­with a chap like that.”

“What is the lowest military rank,” Mary inquired, “that you think Paula could fall in love with?”

The satirical import of her question was not lost upon him but he held his ground.  “It may sound snobbish but it’s true just the same,” he insisted.  “A doughboy’s a doughboy, and Paula wouldn’t get mixed up with one—­any more than you would.”

There was a silence after that.

“His music didn’t sound to me like doughboy music,” Mary observed at last.  “Nor his going to Walt Whitman to get the words.”

“Was that Walt Whitman?  It sounded to me as if he was making it up as he went along.”  He had the grace to grin at himself over that admission, however.  “Oh, well,” he concluded, “Paula’s all right anyhow.  I think she’s—­wonderful, myself.  Only poor old dad!  He is a peach, Mary.  It’s funny how differently I remember him.  He acted like one real sport to-night.”

“Afterward, you mean.”  Mary, it seemed, would not have characterized her father’s behavior earlier in the evening in just that way.  “Tell me all about it.  Only reach me a cigarette first.”

He obeyed the latter injunction with an air of protest.  “It’s the only thing you do that I wish you didn’t,” he said.

“Why?  Do you think it’s bad for me?”

He wouldn’t commit himself by answering that.  The retort it offered her was obvious.  “It doesn’t seem like you,” he explained.

“Very well,” she said, taking a light from his match, “then I shall go on just to keep you reminded that I’m not plaster of Paris.  I like to have somebody around who doesn’t think that.”

“Father doesn’t,” Rush asserted, and got so eager a look of inquiry from her that he regretted having nothing very substantial to satisfy it with.  “Oh, down there in the hall,” he said, “after everybody but March and the Frenchman had gone.  Aunt Lucile began fussing about you.  She was rather up in the air, anyway.  She’d done the nonchalant, all right,—­overdone it a bit in fact—­as long as there was any one around to play up to.  But when we had got rid of the Novellis—­they were the last—­she did a balloon ascension.  She had a fit or two in general and then came round to wondering about you.  Wanted to know when we’d last seen you—­what could have happened to you,—­that sort of thing.  I’d been having a little talk with Graham so I supposed I knew.  But of course I said nothing about that.”

He was looking rather fixedly away from her and so missed her frown of incomprehension.  “Well, but father?” she asked.

It had been coming over him that what his father had said was not just what he wanted to report to Mary.  Not while she felt about him as she had confessed, down there in New York, she did.  But he had let himself in for it.