safely consigned to the past, Paula could not
talk about the shifts and hardships of that time with any relish. The
discouragements must have sunk in pretty deep. She hinted--it was not
the sort of topic she could discourse candidly about--that the
blackest of those discouragements had come from the amorous advances
of men who had it in their power to open opportunities to her but
wanted a _quid pro quo_.

He asked her in that connection whether during those hard times she had
never felt inclined to fall in love on her own account.

"I never cared a snap of my fingers for any man," she said with obvious
sincerity, "until I saw John."

This slowness of her erotic development surprised him rather until he
evoked the explanation that her energies had been concentrated upon her
musical ambition. Music, since she was a real musician, had been a
genuine emotional outlet for her.

March speculated rather actively upon the relation between Paula and her
husband. There was no dark room in the composer's mind. He was the other
pole from Aunt Lucile. All human problems set his mind at work. He was
not widely read in the literature of psychology and he had a rough
working theory which he regarded as his own, a dynamic theory. People got
started off in life with a certain amount of energy. It varied immensely
between individuals, of course, but one couldn't alter the total of his
own. Upon that store you ran until you were spent. What channels this
stream of energy cut for itself was partly a matter of luck, partly one
of self-determination. The important fact was that there was only so much
and that what went down one way did not also go down another. It might be
a hundred rivulets or one river, it couldn't be both. This philosophy was
largely responsible for the ordering of his own life, for his doing
without possessions, for the most part without friends, for his keeping
the brake set so tightly upon his sex impulses.

John must have come into Paula's life, he reflected, at a time when the
musical outlet to her energies had been dammed up. Her main stream, like
that of the Mississippi, had cut a new channel for itself. Had there
been, he wondered, some similar obstruction in the main channel of John
Wollaston's emotional life? Anyhow, there was no doubt that for the five
years since this cataclysm had occurred, the course of true love had run
smooth and deep. But suppose now that, through LaChaise's intervention,
Paula's mu