It had been one of the great experiences of his life, writing that opera.  Jennie’s reminder that he had once believed it good, was a conservative statement.  LaChaise and Paula were deeply impressed by the power, both of its music and its drama and saw possibilities in it for a sensational success.  The drawback, fatal unless it could be overcome, lay in the fact that the dominant role in it was that of the baritone.  Dramatically the soprano’s part was good enough, but there was nowhere near enough for her to sing.  There was no reason though, they both asserted, and sent March away from their conference at least half convinced, why the girl’s part could not be greatly amplified.  There were various expedients;—­a preliminary scene between the girl and her brother; an apostrophe to an absent lover; a prayer.  Also instead of being frozen into terror-stricken silence by her ravisher’s monstrous purpose, she could just as well be represented as making a desperate resistance.  She could plead with him, denounce him; attempt to take advantage of his drunkenness and trick him.  It could be made as good a woman’s part as the big act of Tosca.

March had assented to all this and gone to work.

Paula did not tell him, as he had gloomily prophesied to Jennie, to take the new first scene he brought her that Sunday out to the ash can.  And, indeed, it sounded so much better when they read it over together, that he was for the moment reassured.  But her attitude toward the opera was different from the one she had taken toward the group of Whitman songs, and this difference grew more marked at their subsequent sessions over it.  There had been about the songs the glamour of discovery.  One does not hasten to apply the assayer’s acid to treasure trove.  And, too, it was an altruistic impulse which had prompted her to take up the songs.

There aren’t many people who can travel steadily, or very far, on that motivation, and Paula was not one of them.  From the moment when she took the plunge, ignored—­all but defied—­her husband’s wishes, and signed the Ravinia contract, she ceased to be concerned for anything, broadly speaking, but her own success.  March’s opera, then, was not, to her, the expression of his genius but a potential vehicle for hers.  She was acutely critical of it.  She knew what she wanted and it was not thinkable that she should put up with anything less.

She was not aware of this change of attitude.  She was blessed with a vigorous non-analytical mind that asked no awkward questions, suggested no paralyzing doubts.  The best thing that could possibly happen to March’s opera was that it should be made to fit her; that it should demand precisely all her resources and nothing that was beyond them.  Obviously, since it was going to be her opera, a thing she was going to wear.

Had she been, as many eminent persons in her profession are, a mere bundle of insensate egotisms complicated by a voice, she would have driven March to flat rebellion in a week, all his good resolutions notwithstanding.  What made it tolerable was that she had a good musical intelligence of her own, and a real dramatic sense.  He could recognize, what she wanted as an intelligible thing, consistent with itself.  Only, it was not his thing-not the thing he saw.  By reason of its very consistency it was never the thing he saw.