rous non-analytical mind that asked no awkward questions,
suggested no paralyzing doubts. The best thing that could possibly
happen to March's opera was that it should be made to fit her; that it
should demand precisely all her resources and nothing that was beyond
them. Obviously, since it was going to be her opera, a thing she was
going to wear.

Had she been, as many eminent persons in her profession are, a mere
bundle of insensate egotisms complicated by a voice, she would have
driven March to flat rebellion in a week, all his good resolutions
notwithstanding. What made it tolerable was that she had a good musical
intelligence of her own, and a real dramatic sense. He could recognize,
what she wanted as an intelligible thing, consistent with itself. Only,
it was not his thing-not the thing he saw. By reason of its very
consistency it was never the thing he saw.

"She wouldn't do it that way," he would protest.

"I would," Paula would tell him. "I wouldn't lie there, whimpering."

He was always arguing with her--wrangling, it almost came to,
sometimes--in defense of his own conception. For a sample:

"Look at what she is; a burgomaster's daughter. That means prosperous,
narrow-minded, middle-class people. She's convent-bred, devout. She's
still young or she'd be married. She's altogether without experience.
She's frightened just as a child would be over what's going on in the
house. And the prayer she says when she goes to bed would be just the
nice little prayer a child would say, an Our Father or a Hail Mary,
whatever it might be. As simple as possible, on the surface, but with an
undertone of overmastering terror. The sort of Promethean defiance you're
talking about would be inconceivable to a child like that."

"I suppose it would, to most of them," she admitted, "but this one's
going to be different. After all, it's the exceptional ones that usually
have operas written about them. I don't believe all the dancers in
Alexandria were like Thais, nor all the gipsy cigar-makers in Seville
like Carmen. I don't believe many little Japanese girls would feel about
Pinkerton the way Cio Cio San did. Why can't our Dolores be an
exception, too?"

The only answer he could make to that was that it spoiled the other
figure, reduced him from a sort of cosmic monster to the mere custom-made
grand-opera villain.

"What if it does?" she retorted. "This isn't being written for Scotti or
Vanni Marcoux. It's being written fo