ywhere in the room.

"No, I'm not tired and I really don't want any tea. I've gone slack on
purpose because that's how I want to be till nine o'clock. I've just
eaten an enormous oyster stew with Rush. That's what we waited for."

John frowned. "My dear, you'll have ruined your appetite for dinner."

"I hope so," she said, "because I'm not to have any."

At that, from the other two men, there began an expostulatory--"No
dinner!" "You don't mean ...!" but it was silenced by John's
crisp--"You're planning not to come down to dinner, then?"

"Oh, I'll come down," said Paula, "and I'll sit. But I don't mean to eat
anything. Unless you think that will be too much like a--what is
it?--skeleton at the feast."

"I think it would seem somewhat-exaggerated," he said.

"Well," Paula retorted, drawing the rest of the room into it again just
as Wallace was making a gallant effort to start a subsidiary conversation
to serve as a screen, "that's because you haven't heard those songs. If
there's a singer in the world who'd dare--cut loose with them right after
eating the sort of dinner Lucile will have to-night for Mary and Rush,
I'd like to see him try it."

"I didn't mean to imply that they were not difficult. I dare say they are
all but impossible. But it does seem to me that you are taking the
occasion of singing them--a little too--emotionally."

The tone he was trying for was meant to have nothing in it--for other
ears than hers, at least, beyond mere good-humored remonstrance. But her
reply tore all pretense aside. She let him have it straight.

"You're the one who's being emotional about it," she said.

The blood leaped into his face at that but he did not reply.

"Look here, John," she went on--and her big voice swept away the polite
convention that the others were not listening, "I've told you that this
won't work and you must see now that that's true. There's still time to
call up March and tell him that it's to-morrow instead of to-day. Because
of Rush and Mary. Won't you let me do that?"

It is just possible that if he had been alone with her, he might have
acknowledged the issue, might have admitted that this new composer whose
works she had been so absorbed in, frightened him, figured in his mind as
the present manifestation of a force that was trying to take her away
from him. And having let her see that, he could safely enough have said,
"Have your own way about it. You know what will work and what won't.