He showed surprise that Sylvia failed to follow this, and explained.  “I mean the voice is no good to that kind of a man, it’s no good to anybody.  It’s the craziest, accidental affair anyhow, haven’t you ever noticed it?—­who draws the fine voices.  Half the time—­more than half the time, most of the time it seems to me when I’ve been recently to a lot of concerts, the people who have the voices haven’t any other qualifications for being singers.  And it’s so with coal-mines, with everything else that’s inherited.  For five years now I’ve given up what I’d like to do, and I’ve tried, under the best maestri I could find, to make something out of my voice, so to speak.  And it’s no go.  It’s in the nature of things that I can’t make a go of it.  Over everything I do lies the taint that I’m the ‘owner’!  They are suspicious of me, always will be—­and rightly so.  Anybody else not connected with the mediaeval idea of ‘possession’ could do better than I. The whole relation’s artificial.  I’m in it for the preposterous reason that my father, operating on Wall Street, made a lucky guess,—­as though I should be called upon to run a locomotive because my middle initial is L!”

Sylvia still felt the same slight sense of flatness when this recurring topic thrust itself into a personal talk; but during the last month she had adjusted herself to Page so that this no longer showed on the surface.  She was indeed quite capable of taking an interest in the subject, as soon as she could modulate herself into the new key.  “Yes, of course,” she agreed, “it’s like so many other things that are perfectly necessary to go on with, perfectly absurd when you look closely at them.  My father nearly lost his position once for saying that all inheritance was wrong.  But even he never had the slightest suggestion as to what to do about it, how to get an inheritance into the hands of the people who might make the best use of it.”  She was used from her childhood to this sort of academic doubt of everything, conducted side by side with a practical acceptance of everything.  Professor and Madame La Rue, in actual life devotedly faithful married lovers, staid, stout, habit-ridden elderly people, professed a theoretical belief in the flexibility of relationships sanctioned by the practice of free love.  It was perhaps with this recollection in her mind that she suggested, “Don’t you suppose it will be like the institution of marriage, very, very gradually altered till it fits conditions better?”

“In the meantime, how about the cases of those who are unhappily married?”

“I don’t see anything for them but just to get along the best they can,” she told him.

“You think I’d better give up trying to do anything with my Colorado—?” he asked her, as though genuinely seeking advice.

“I should certainly think that five years was plenty long enough for a fair trial!  You’d make a better ambassador than an active captain of industry, anyhow,” she said with conviction.  Whereupon he bestowed on her a long, thoughtful stare, as though he were profoundly pondering her suggestion.