f unselfishness, the attempt to
feel for others, could lead a small group like a family into!

Another thing that helped was that during the fortnight of rehearsal
before the season opened, there wasn't time to think. They were pelted
by perfectly external events, a necessity for doing this, an appointment
to do that, an engagement somewhere else. It was like being caught out
in a driving rain. You scuttled along-snatched a momentary shelter where
you could.

Even getting the clothes Paula needed would have filled the time of a
woman of leisure to the brim. A bridal trousseau would have been nothing
to it. But with Paula these activities had to be sandwiched in with daily
rehearsals,--long ones, too,--hours with Novelli while she memorized
half-forgotten parts, interviews with reporters, struggles with
photographers, everything that the diabolic ingenuity of the publicity
man could contrive. He, by the way, regarded Paula as his best bet and
lavished his efforts upon her in a way that stirred her colleagues
(rivals, of course), to a frenzied exasperation, over his sinister
partiality to this "society amateur."

(They all but enjoyed a terrible revenge, for as poetic justice narrowly
missed having it, the extent of her advance publicity and the beauty of
her clothes proved to be the rocks she went aground on. Only a lucky wave
came along and floated her off again.)

Mary's quarrel with Paula, though it never came off,--never for that
matter got through to Paula's consciousness, even as an approach to
one,--had, all the same, a chain of consequences and so deserves to be
recorded. The opera management was supposed to supply Paula with a piano
and they found one already installed in the Ravinia house when they moved
in, a small grand of a widely advertised make. Paula dug half a dozen
vicious arpeggios out of it and condemned it out of hand. Then in the
midst of a petulant outburst which had, nevertheless, a humorous savor
(the management would promise and pretend till kingdom come. They'd even
take real trouble to get out of complying with her simple request for a
new piano), she pulled herself up short and stared at Mary.

"What idiots we are! I am, anyhow. I'd forgotten all about March. He can
make a piano out of anything. When he's tuned this, I won't want another.
I've got his telephone number somewhere. You don't happen to remember it,
do you?--Why? What makes you look like that?"

For Mary was staring at her--