drama. It had come pat upon what
he had told her of the lives her father had plucked from the hand of
death, the ironic, "he saved others, himself he can not save," hanging
unspoken in their thoughts.

"Paula will be fighting for his life," he said. "Magnificently. That must
be one of your hopes."

She had confirmed this with details. She got the notion, perhaps from
nothing more than his rather thoughtful smile, that he comprehended the
whole thing, even down to Aunt Lucile. Though wasn't there a phrase of
his,--"these uninhibited people, when it comes to getting things _done_
..." that slanted that way? Did that mean that he was one of the other
sort? Wasn't your ability to recognize the absence of a quality or a
disability in any one else, proof enough that you had it yourself? It
would never, certainly, occur to Paula to think of any one as
"uninhibited."

But the opposed adjective didn't fit him. She couldn't see him at all as
a person tangled, helpless, in webs of his own spinning;--neither the man
who had written that love song nor the man who had sat down in his chair
again after Rush had slammed the door.

He wasn't even shy but he was, except for that moment when a vivid
concern over John Wollaston's illness brought him back, oddly remote,
detached. He might have been a Martian, when in response to her leading
he discussed Paula with her; how good a musician she was; how splendidly
equipped physically and temperamentally for an operatic career. "She has
abandoned all that now, I suppose," he said. "Everything that goes with
it. She would wish, if she ever gave us a thought, that LaChaise and I
had never been born."

Mary would have tried to deny this but that the quality and tone of his
voice told her that he really knew it and that, miraculously, he didn't
care. She had exclaimed with a sincerity struck out of her by amazement,
"I don't see how you know that."

"Paula's a conqueror," he had answered simply, "a--compeller. It's her
instinct to compel. That's what makes her the artist she is. Without her
voice she might have been a tamer of wild beasts. And, of course, a great
audience that has paid extravagantly for its pleasure is a wild beast,
that will purr if she compels it, snarl at her if she doesn't manage to.
She's been hissed, howled at. And that's the possibility that makes
cheers intoxicating. Left too long without something to conquer, she
feels in a vacuum, smothered. Well, she's got somet