hing now; the greatest
thing in the world to her,--her husband's life. She's flung off the other
thing like a cloak."

Without, at the moment, any sense of its being an extraordinary question,
Mary asked, "Are you glad? That she has forgotten you, I mean."

She was not able, thinking it over afterward, to recall anything that
could have served as a cue for so far-fetched a supposition as that. It
could have sprung from nothing more palpable than the contrast suggested
between Paula, the compeller, the _dompteuse_, and the man who had just
been so describing her. He was so very thin; he was, if one looked
closely, rather shabby, and beyond that, it had struck her that a haggard
air there was about him was the product of an advanced stage of
fatigue,--or hunger. But that of course, was absurd. Anyhow, not even the
sound of her question startled her.

Nor did it him. There was something apologetic about his smile. "It _is_
a reprieve," he admitted. "I left her a week ago," he went on to
explain,--"it must have been the day Doctor Wollaston fell ill--on a
promise not to come back until I had got this opera of mine into the
shape she wants. I came back to-day to tell her that it can't be
done--not by me. I have tried my utmost and it isn't enough. I haven't
improved it even from her point of view let alone from mine. She isn't an
easy person to come to with a confession of failure."

"She's spoiling it," Mary said. "Why do you let her?"

But March dissented from that. "If we agree that the thing's an
opera--and of course that's what it is if it's anything--then what she
wants it made over into is better than what I wrote. She's trying to put
the Puccini throb into it. She's trying to make better drama out of it.
LaChaise agrees with her. He said at the beginning that I relied too much
on the orchestra and didn't give the singers enough to do. And, of
course, it's easy to see that what a woman like Paula said or did would
be more important to an audience than anything that an oboe could
possibly say. When I'm with her, she--galvanizes me into a sort of belief
that I can accomplish the thing she wants, but when I go off alone and
try to do it...." He blinked and shook his head. "It has been a
first-class nightmare, for a fact, this last week."

But Mary demanded again. "Why do you let her?"

"I made a good resolution a while ago," he said. "It was--it was the
night she sang those Whitman songs. You see I've never been t