Paula with her splendid physique and gorgeous voice must have looked to them like the family hope.  They had managed at considerable sacrifice to send her abroad, but evidently without any idea of the time and the money it takes to erect even the most promising material into a genuine success.  After a year or two, she had been abandoned to make her way as best she could.

Even now that they were safely consigned to the past, Paula could not talk about the shifts and hardships of that time with any relish.  The discouragements must have sunk in pretty deep.  She hinted—­it was not the sort of topic she could discourse candidly about—­that the blackest of those discouragements had come from the amorous advances of men who had it in their power to open opportunities to her but wanted a quid pro quo.

He asked her in that connection whether during those hard times she had never felt inclined to fall in love on her own account.

“I never cared a snap of my fingers for any man,” she said with obvious sincerity, “until I saw John.”

This slowness of her erotic development surprised him rather until he evoked the explanation that her energies had been concentrated upon her musical ambition.  Music, since she was a real musician, had been a genuine emotional outlet for her.

March speculated rather actively upon the relation between Paula and her husband.  There was no dark room in the composer’s mind.  He was the other pole from Aunt Lucile.  All human problems set his mind at work.  He was not widely read in the literature of psychology and he had a rough working theory which he regarded as his own, a dynamic theory.  People got started off in life with a certain amount of energy.  It varied immensely between individuals, of course, but one couldn’t alter the total of his own.  Upon that store you ran until you were spent.  What channels this stream of energy cut for itself was partly a matter of luck, partly one of self-determination.  The important fact was that there was only so much and that what went down one way did not also go down another.  It might be a hundred rivulets or one river, it couldn’t be both.  This philosophy was largely responsible for the ordering of his own life, for his doing without possessions, for the most part without friends, for his keeping the brake set so tightly upon his sex impulses.

John must have come into Paula’s life, he reflected, at a time when the musical outlet to her energies had been dammed up.  Her main stream, like that of the Mississippi, had cut a new channel for itself.  Had there been, he wondered, some similar obstruction in the main channel of John Wollaston’s emotional life?  Anyhow, there was no doubt that for the five years since this cataclysm had occurred, the course of true love had run smooth and deep.  But suppose now that, through LaChaise’s intervention, Paula’s musical career was again opened to her, would the current turn that way?  Would John be left stranded?  Had Paula herself any misgivings to this effect?