r me." That was the tonic chord they
always came back to. It was Paula's opera.

March presently began to feel, too, that he was growing to be nothing
more than Paula's composer. It was important to the success of their
enterprise that his reputation should be intensively exploited among the
rich and influential who figured as patrons of the Ravinia season. She
went at the task of building it as ruthlessly as she remodeled his opera.

Her demands upon him were explicit. In the first place he was to bring
her all his music, early as well as late, trivial as well as important,
in order that she might select from it what, if anything, might be
exploited at once. She had promised to give a recital just before Easter,
in aid of one of the local charities--it was one that boasted an
important list of patronesses--and if she could make an exclusive program
of his songs she would like to do so. Then, while it was too late to get
any of his compositions performed by the orchestra this season, it would
be a good thing to get Mr. Stock to read something in the hope of his
taking it for next year. An announcement, even a mere unofficial
intimation, that Anthony March (whose opera ... and so on)--was to be
represented on the symphony programs next season, would help a lot.

What dismayed him most was her insistence--she was clear as a bell about
this--that he himself get up the accompaniments to some of the simpler of
his songs so that when she took him out to meet people who wanted to hear
a sample of his music then and there, they could manage, between them,
some sort of compliance. He nearly got angry, but decided to laugh
instead, over her demand that he be waiting, back stage, when she gave
her recital of his songs (which she did with great success) to come out
at the end and take his bow in his now discarded uniform. It was the only
reference she ever made to his shabby appearance.

(It was steadily growing shabbier, too, since she left him hardly any
time at all for tuning pianos. She would have been utterly horrified had
she known what tiny sums he was living on from week to week. And it never
occurred to her when she suggested that a certain score of his ought to
be copied, that he could not afford to take it out to a professional
copyist and so sat up nights doing it himself. He did it rather easily,
to be sure, since it was one of the numerous things at which he had
earned a living.)

There was only one of her many de