“She wouldn’t do it that way,” he would protest.

“I would,” Paula would tell him.  “I wouldn’t lie there, whimpering.”

He was always arguing with her—­wrangling, it almost came to, sometimes—­in defense of his own conception.  For a sample: 

“Look at what she is; a burgomaster’s daughter.  That means prosperous, narrow-minded, middle-class people.  She’s convent-bred, devout.  She’s still young or she’d be married.  She’s altogether without experience.  She’s frightened just as a child would be over what’s going on in the house.  And the prayer she says when she goes to bed would be just the nice little prayer a child would say, an Our Father or a Hail Mary, whatever it might be.  As simple as possible, on the surface, but with an undertone of overmastering terror.  The sort of Promethean defiance you’re talking about would be inconceivable to a child like that.”

“I suppose it would, to most of them,” she admitted, “but this one’s going to be different.  After all, it’s the exceptional ones that usually have operas written about them.  I don’t believe all the dancers in Alexandria were like Thais, nor all the gipsy cigar-makers in Seville like Carmen.  I don’t believe many little Japanese girls would feel about Pinkerton the way Cio Cio San did.  Why can’t our Dolores be an exception, too?”

The only answer he could make to that was that it spoiled the other figure, reduced him from a sort of cosmic monster to the mere custom-made grand-opera villain.

“What if it does?” she retorted.  “This isn’t being written for Scotti or Vanni Marcoux.  It’s being written for me.”  That was the tonic chord they always came back to.  It was Paula’s opera.

March presently began to feel, too, that he was growing to be nothing more than Paula’s composer.  It was important to the success of their enterprise that his reputation should be intensively exploited among the rich and influential who figured as patrons of the Ravinia season.  She went at the task of building it as ruthlessly as she remodeled his opera.

Her demands upon him were explicit.  In the first place he was to bring her all his music, early as well as late, trivial as well as important, in order that she might select from it what, if anything, might be exploited at once.  She had promised to give a recital just before Easter, in aid of one of the local charities—­it was one that boasted an important list of patronesses—­and if she could make an exclusive program of his songs she would like to do so.  Then, while it was too late to get any of his compositions performed by the orchestra this season, it would be a good thing to get Mr. Stock to read something in the hope of his taking it for next year.  An announcement, even a mere unofficial intimation, that Anthony March (whose opera ... and so on)—­was to be represented on the symphony programs next season, would help a lot.