What dismayed him most was her insistence—­she was clear as a bell about this—­that he himself get up the accompaniments to some of the simpler of his songs so that when she took him out to meet people who wanted to hear a sample of his music then and there, they could manage, between them, some sort of compliance.  He nearly got angry, but decided to laugh instead, over her demand that he be waiting, back stage, when she gave her recital of his songs (which she did with great success) to come out at the end and take his bow in his now discarded uniform.  It was the only reference she ever made to his shabby appearance.

(It was steadily growing shabbier, too, since she left him hardly any time at all for tuning pianos.  She would have been utterly horrified had she known what tiny sums he was living on from week to week.  And it never occurred to her when she suggested that a certain score of his ought to be copied, that he could not afford to take it out to a professional copyist and so sat up nights doing it himself.  He did it rather easily, to be sure, since it was one of the numerous things at which he had earned a living.)

There was only one of her many demands that he persistently refused to comply with.  And she took this refusal rather hard; acted more hurt than angry about it, to be sure, but came back to it again and again.  When she discovered that he made no pretense of living at his father’s house, she asked for his real address so that she could always be sure of getting at him when she wanted him.  This he would not give her.  If he did, he said, it would only result in his staying away from there and doing his work somewhere else.  It was one of his simple necessities to know that he couldn’t be got at.  He would make every possible concession.  Would go, or telephone, at punctiliously regular and brief intervals, to his father’s house to learn whether she had sent for him, but give up the secrecy of his lair he would not.  It wasn’t possible.

I think she compensated herself for this refusal by sending for him sometimes when she did not really need him, just to be on the safe side, and, on the same basis, engaged his attendance ahead from day to day.  Anyhow, she occupied, in one way or another, practically the whole of his time; and the dumb little blue-eyed princess knocked at his door in vain.  Only in those hours when sheer fatigue had sent him to bed had she any opportunity of visiting him.  Sometimes she made white nights for him by haunting those hours, refusing to go away; sometimes, by not coming at all, she filled him with terror lest she had gone for good—­would not come back even when he was ready for her.  When that panic was upon him he hated Paula with a devouring hatred.