“Paula will be fighting for his life,” he said.  “Magnificently.  That must be one of your hopes.”

She had confirmed this with details.  She got the notion, perhaps from nothing more than his rather thoughtful smile, that he comprehended the whole thing, even down to Aunt Lucile.  Though wasn’t there a phrase of his,—­“these uninhibited people, when it comes to getting things done ...” that slanted that way?  Did that mean that he was one of the other sort?  Wasn’t your ability to recognize the absence of a quality or a disability in any one else, proof enough that you had it yourself?  It would never, certainly, occur to Paula to think of any one as “uninhibited.”

But the opposed adjective didn’t fit him.  She couldn’t see him at all as a person tangled, helpless, in webs of his own spinning;—­neither the man who had written that love song nor the man who had sat down in his chair again after Rush had slammed the door.

He wasn’t even shy but he was, except for that moment when a vivid concern over John Wollaston’s illness brought him back, oddly remote, detached.  He might have been a Martian, when in response to her leading he discussed Paula with her; how good a musician she was; how splendidly equipped physically and temperamentally for an operatic career.  “She has abandoned all that now, I suppose,” he said.  “Everything that goes with it.  She would wish, if she ever gave us a thought, that LaChaise and I had never been born.”

Mary would have tried to deny this but that the quality and tone of his voice told her that he really knew it and that, miraculously, he didn’t care.  She had exclaimed with a sincerity struck out of her by amazement, “I don’t see how you know that.”

“Paula’s a conqueror,” he had answered simply, “a—­compeller.  It’s her instinct to compel.  That’s what makes her the artist she is.  Without her voice she might have been a tamer of wild beasts.  And, of course, a great audience that has paid extravagantly for its pleasure is a wild beast, that will purr if she compels it, snarl at her if she doesn’t manage to.  She’s been hissed, howled at.  And that’s the possibility that makes cheers intoxicating.  Left too long without something to conquer, she feels in a vacuum, smothered.  Well, she’s got something now; the greatest thing in the world to her,—­her husband’s life.  She’s flung off the other thing like a cloak.”

Without, at the moment, any sense of its being an extraordinary question, Mary asked, “Are you glad?  That she has forgotten you, I mean.”

She was not able, thinking it over afterward, to recall anything that could have served as a cue for so far-fetched a supposition as that.  It could have sprung from nothing more palpable than the contrast suggested between Paula, the compeller, the dompteuse, and the man who had just been so describing her.  He was so very thin; he was, if one looked closely, rather shabby, and beyond that, it had struck her that a haggard air there was about him was the product of an advanced stage of fatigue,—­or hunger.  But that of course, was absurd.  Anyhow, not even the sound of her question startled her.