“I needn’t have worried though.  When we sat down for our smoke in the library, it was exactly as if nothing had happened.  I’d have been tearing my hair but old dad....  He certainly is a peach.”

Rush paused there for some comment from her and when she made none, looked around at her.  Her hands were lightly clasped across her breast, her eyelids nearly closed.  Save for her barely perceptible breathing, she lay dead still.

“Have I talked you to sleep?” he asked.

“No,” she said, “I was thinking what a mixed-up thing life is.  The way you can’t help liking and admiring the people you wish you could hate and hating and hurting the ones you love.”  Then her eyes came open with a smile and she held out a hand toward him.  “You don’t have to answer that.  It’s the sort of silly thing people say when they have been drinking gin.  What I was really wondering was whether there will be anything about Mr. March’s opera in that contract Paula signs with LaChaise?”

This startled him.  “I never thought of that,” he answered.  “Do you suppose that’s it?  Oh, it can’t be!  She wouldn’t chuck dad for that doughboy piano tuner.  Not Paula!”

“Oh, no,” said Mary.  “She wouldn’t do that.  It wouldn’t look to her like that, anyhow.  She’s got enough, don’t you see, for everybody; for dad and—­and the doughboy as well.  Father wouldn’t have any less, if he could just make up his mind that he didn’t have to have it all.  And as for the other, why, it might be the greatest thing that could possibly happen to him;—­being in love with Paula and writing operas for her and having her sing them the way she sang those songs to-night.  I suppose that’s what a genius needs.  And you couldn’t blame her exactly.  At least there always have been people like that and the world hasn’t blamed them—­no matter how moral it pretends to be.  It’s the other sort of people, the ones who won’t take anything unless they can have it all and who can’t give anything unless they can give it all—­those that haven’t but one thing to give—­that are—­no good.”

He didn’t more than half understand her, which was fortunate, since he was rather horrified as it was.  He put it down broadly as the same sort of nervous crisis that he had encountered in New York, a sort of hypersensitiveness due to the strain of war work—­the thing he had amused her by speaking of as shell-shock.

“I think perhaps I know what has upset you to-night,” he said uncomfortably.  “At least Graham told me about it.”

She looked at him with a puzzled frown.  It was the third time that he had brought up the Stannard boy’s name.  What in the world...?