d 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 assumptions. 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
dispassionate 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 t