From the doorway she stood, for a moment, staring. Then she managed a smile (it was the only possible att.i.tude to take) at Sir Galahad, above the bed. The notion of flinging herself down for a self-pitying revel upon that bed,--the other Mary's virginal little narrow bed--had become unthinkable. The thing to do was to stop thinking. Quickly.

She stripped off her suit and blouse, slipped on a pongee kimono that she got out of her hand-bag, unlocked her trunk and began discharging its contents all about the room. She covered the chairs with them, the bed, the narrow table--that had never had anything upon it but that Fra Angelico triptych and the two candlesticks--the round table with the reading lamp, the writing desk in the corner, the floor. Then, a little out of breath, she paused.

Which among two or three possible frocks should she wear for the party to-night? What sort of party was it going to be anyhow? It was curious, considering the fact that they had done nothing but sit and talk all the morning, how vague her ideas about it were. Her father had said something out in the car about having a few old friends in for dinner.

Paula was going to sing and professed herself frightened by the prospect. Also she had cited it as the reason for an unusually and almost strenuously unoccupied day. On the other hand it was keeping Aunt Lucile distractedly busy.

Was it the chance result of their preoccupation with other things that she had been given no more intelligible account of it, or was it something that all three of them, her father, Paula and Aunt Lucile, were walking round the edge of? The nub of some seriously trivial quarrel? Was that why Paula was so elaborately disengaged and Aunt Lucile so portentous? Was it even perhaps why her father had so abruptly fled this morning without coming into the house?

She treated this surmise kindly. It was something to think about anyhow; something to sharpen her wits upon, just as a cat stretches her claws in the nap of the drawing-room rug. She rescued from oblivion half a dozen remarks heard during the morning, whose significance had gone over her head, and tentatively fitted them together like bits of a picture puzzle.

She hadn't enough to go on but she believed there was something there.

And when a little later in the afternoon, she heard, along with a knock on her door, her aunt asking if she might come in, she gave her an enthusiastic welcome, scooped an armful of things out of a chair and cleared a sitting s.p.a.ce for herself at the foot of the bed.

"Would this blue thing do for to-night?" she asked, "or isn't it enough of an affair? What sort of party is it anyhow?"

"Goodness knows," said Lucile. "Between your father and Paula I find it rather upsetting."

Mary had reached out negligently for her cigarette case, lighted one and letting it droop at a rather impossible angle, supported by the lightest pressure of her lips so that the smoke crept up over her face into her lashes and her hair, folded her hands demurely in her lap and waited for her aunt to go on. She was mischievously half aware of the disturbing effect of this sort of thing upon Lucile.

"What has there been between them?" Mary asked, when it became clear that her aunt needed prompting. "Between father and Paula, I mean. Not a row?"

Mary never used language like this except provocatively. It worked on her aunt as she had meant it to.

"There has been nothing between them," she said, "that requires a rowdy word like that to express. It has not been even a quarrel. But they have been for the last day or two, a little--at ..."

"Outs?" Mary suggested.

This had been the word on Lucile's tongue. "At cross purposes," she amended and paused again. But Mary seeing that she was fairly launched waited, economically, meanwhile, inhaling all the smoke from her cigarette. "I suppose after all, it's quite natural," Lucile began, "that Paula should attract geniuses, since she's rather by way of being one herself."

Mary took the cigarette in her fingers so that she could speak a little more crisply than was possible around it. "Who is the genius she's attracting now? Doesn't father like him? And is he being not asked to the party? I'm sorry, aunt, I didn't mean to interrupt."

"He is being asked which, it appears, is what Paula objects to; only not until after dinner. That she insisted upon. Really," she went on, in response to her niece's perplexed frown, "I shall be much more intelligible If you'll let me begin at the beginning."

"Please do," said Mary. "Where did Paula find him?"

"I found him," said Miss Wollaston. "Paula discovered him a little later.

I found him on a bench in the park and told him he might come to tune the drawing-room piano. Paula had him tune her piano instead and spent what must have been a rather mad day with him over it. He brought round some songs the next day for her to try and she and Portia Stanton's husband have been practising them with hardly any intermission since. The idea was that when they had 'got them up' as they say, the man,--March his name is, Anthony March, I think,--should be invited round to hear Paula sing them. Paula insists, absurdly it seems to me, that he never has heard a note of them himself; that he can't even play them upon the piano. How he could compose them without playing them on the piano first, is beyond me. But she is inclined to be a little emotional, I think, over the whole episode. Quite naturally--even Paula can't deny that--your father thought he would like to be present when the songs were sung and it was arranged that it should be this evening."

"She may not have been able to deny that it was natural," Mary observed, "but I'd bet she didn't like it."

"It's only fair to Paula to say," Miss Wollaston insisted, "that she did nothing to exhibit a feeling of that sort. But when, at John's suggestion, I spoke of the possibility of having in the Cravens and the Blakes,--the Cravens are very musical, you know--and Wallace Hood who would be really hurt if we left him out, Paula came nearer to being downright rude than she often allows herself to be. She said among other things that she didn't propose to have March subjected to a 'suffocating' affair like that. She said she wanted him free to interrupt as often as he liked and tell them how rotten they were. That was her phrase. When I observed that Mr. March didn't impress me as the sort of person who could conceivably wish to be rude as that she said he could no more remember to be polite when he heard those songs for the first time than she herself could sing them in corsets. She summed it up by saying that it wasn't going to be a polite affair and the fewer polite people there were, hanging about, the better. There was, naturally, nothing I could say to that."

"I should think not," Mary agreed, exhaling rather explosively an enormous cloud of smoke. "Poor Aunt Lucile!" Her commiseration didn't sound more than skin deep.

"The matter rested there," the elder woman went on, "until your father received Rush's telegram that you were coming to-day. Then he took matters into his own hands and gave me a list of the people he wanted asked. There are to be about a dozen besides ourselves at dinner and perhaps as many more are to come after."

"I can see Paula when you told her that," Mary reflected. "Or did you make dad tell her himself? Yes, of course you did! Only what I can't understand is why Paula didn't say, 'All right. Have your party, and I'll sing if you want me to. Only not--what's his name?--March's songs.' And have him all to herself, as she wanted him, later. That would have been mate in one move, I should think."

Then, at the fleeting look she caught in the act of vanishing from her aunt's face, she cried, "You mean she _did_ say that? And that father turned to ice, the way he can and--made a point of it? You know it's serious, if he's done that."

With a vigor meant to compensate for a sad lack of conviction, Miss Wollaston protested against this chain of unwarranted a.s.sumptions. But she admitted, at last, that her own surmise accorded with that of her niece. John certainly had said to her at breakfast that he saw no reason for foregoing the musical feature of the evening simply because an audience was to be present to hear it. Paula's only comment had been a dispa.s.sionate prediction that it wouldn't work. It wouldn't be fair to say she sulked; her rather elaborate detachment had been too good-humored for that. Her statement, at lunch, that she was to be turned on like a Victrola at half past nine, was a fair sample.

"What's he like, this genius of hers?" Mary wanted to know. "Young and downy and helpless, I suppose. With a look as if he was just about to burst into tears. I met one like that last winter." She knew exactly how to get results out of her aunt.

"He's not in the least like that! If he had been I should never have brought him home, not even to tune the piano. He's quite a well behaved, sensible-appearing young man, a little over thirty, I should say. And he does speak nicely, though I think Paula exaggerates about that."

"Sensible or not, he's fallen wildly in love with her, of course," Mary observed. "The more so they are the more instantaneously they do it."

But this lead was one Miss Wollaston absolutely declined to follow. "If that clock's right," she exclaimed, gazing at a little traveling affair Mary had brought home with her, "I haven't another minute." It was not right, for it was still keeping New York time, but the diversion served.

"Wallace Hood spoke of coming in to see you about tea-time," she said from the doorway. "I'm going to be to busy even to stop for a cup, so do be down if you can."

CHAPTER V

JOHN MAKES A POINT OF IT

Mary was warmly touched by the thought of Wallace's coming to see her in that special sort of way when he was certain of finding her at dinner an hour or two later. Her feelings about him were rather mixed but he dated back to the very earliest of her memories, and his kindly affectionate att.i.tude toward her had never failed, even during those periods when she had treated him most detestably. Even as a little girl, she had been aware of his sentimental attachment to her mother and perhaps in an instinctive way had resented it, though her actual indictment against Wallace in those days had always been that he made her naughty; incited her by his perpetual a.s.sumption that she was the angelic little creature she looked, to one desperate misdemeanor after another, for which her father usually punished her. Mary had, superficially anyhow, her mother's looks along with her father's temper.

But for two years after Mrs. Wollaston's death, she and Wallace had been very good friends. She was grateful to him for treating her like a grown-up, for talking to her, as he often did, about her mother and how much she had meant to him. (She owed it, indeed, largely to Wallace that her memories of this sentimental, romantic, pa.s.sionless lady with whom in life she had never been completely in sympathy, were as sweet and satisfactory as they were.) He had taken infinite pains with her, guiding her reading and her enjoyment of pictures in the paths of good taste. He took her to concerts sometimes, too, though at this point her docility ceased. She wouldn't be musical for anybody. He gave her much-needed advice in dealing with social matters which her sudden prematurity forced her to cope with. And with all this went a placidity which had no part at all in her relations with her father.

She got the idea, during this period, that he meant, when she was a little older, to ask her to marry him, and she sometimes speculated whether, if he did, she would. There would be something beautifully appropriate about it;--like the Professor's Love Story. Usually, though, she terminated the scene with a tender refusal.

She had long known, of course, how unreal all this was. Wallace had faded into complete invisibility at the time when she fell in love with Captain Burch and quarreled with her father about him. She couldn't remember afterward whether he had even been on the scene or not. But the savor of their friendship, though mild, was a pleasant one and there was none of her old acquaintances she'd rather have looked forward to to-day at tea-time in the drawing-room. She knew exactly what he would be like; just what they would say to each other. The only doubt in her mind was whether he'd bring her chocolates or daffodils.

She guessed wrong. It was a box of candied strawberries that he gave her as soon as their double hand-shake set him free. But nothing else came at once to the surface to falsify her prevision. She remembered how he liked his tea and was able to get an affectionate warmth into her voice, that sounded real though strangely enough it wasn't, in agreeing with him how like old times this was and how good it seemed to be home. Then came the joy of having Rush back again, and the war, and the Peace Conference,--only we weren't going to talk about things like that. And then Alan Seeger, Rupert Brooke, Conningsby Dawson.

But oddly enough, she felt herself going back to still older times, to the abominable little girl who had yielded to irresistible desires such as making faces at him and rubbing the nap of his silk hat the wrong way. She repressed, vigorously, this lawless vein. She was determined for this one day to be just as nice as he tried, so hard, to think she was.

But with this resolution occupying her mind the talk presently ran rather thin, her contribution to it for whole minutes drying up entirely. It was after a rather blank silence that he said he supposed Paula was lying down, resting for to-night's performance. His inflection struck Mary as a little too casual and reminded her that it was his first mention of her stepmother's name. This roused her attention.

"Oh, Paula's off playing with Rush," she said. "I believe they went to a matinee."

He exclaimed at that, over Paula's stores of energy and her reckless ways of spending them. He said she gave him the impression of being absolutely tireless, superimposing a high speed society existence which John Wollaston and he, in relays, could hardly keep up with, upon the heavy routine of work in her studio. He ill.u.s.trated this with a schedule of her activities during the last three days. "Oh, yes," he threw in, in parenthesis, "I'm as much in the family as ever. When your father can't do escort duty, they call on me." He added in conclusion that he was glad she had already made a start toward getting acquainted with Rush.

Was this relief, Mary wondered--at learning that she was not at this moment engaged less domestically somewhere with Anthony March? But she doubted whether this was a good guess. If he did feel any such relief, it was not, at all events, from a personal jealousy; for the illuminating conviction had come over her that Wallace could not possibly be one of Paula's conquests. A man still capable of cherishing as the most beautiful event of his life, that sentimental platonic friendship he had enjoyed with her mother, would be immune against Paula's spells.

She wondered if he wasn't a little afraid of Paula. If he did not, in his heart, actually dislike her. But if this were true, why did he willingly devote so many of his hours to squiring her about, subst.i.tuting for her husband? (She told herself, as one discovering a great truth, that a subst.i.tute was exactly what Heaven had ordained Wallace Hood to be.) She kept him going about Paula easily enough, as a sort of obbligato to these meditations and her name was on Wallace's lips when John Wollaston came into the room.

"Where is she?" he asked Mary. "I hoped I'd find her resting for to-night." Evidently he had been up to her room to see. The relief was plainly legible in his face when he got Mary's answer.

"She and Rush, eh," he said. "I'm glad they've made a start together, but they ought to be back by now. They drove, didn't they?"

She couldn't inform him as to that and by way of getting him to come to anchor, offered him his tea.

"Oh, I'll wait for the others," he said. "They can't be much later than this.--I'm glad she's taken a vacation from those songs," he went on presently from the fireplace. "She told me last night she'd been working all day with Novelli over them. Only sent him home about half an hour before it was time for her to dress for dinner. Do you suppose,"--this to Wallace--"that they're as wonderful as she thinks they are?"

It was obvious to Mary that Hood's reply was calculated to soothe; his att.i.tude was indulgent. He talked to Mary about March as just another of Paula's delightful extravagances. March's indignant refusal, at first, to tune the Circa.s.sian grand, his trick of sitting on the floor under Paula's piano while she played for him, his forgetting to be paid, though he had not, in all probability, a cent in his pockets, were exhibited as whimsicalities, such as Wallace's favorite author, J.M. Barrie, might have invented. It was just like Paula to take him up as she had done, to work away for days at his songs, proclaiming the wonder of them all the while. "We're all hoping, of course," he concluded, "that when she's finished with them to-night, she'll sing us some of the old familiar music we really love."