on this occasion, to recuperate in
his own manner.

Mary adventured again just as she was getting up to take her leave. "It
must want a good courage," she said, "to let him go like that; not to
keep trying, at least, to hold him back in sheltered ways."

She got a nod of acknowledgment of the truth of this, but no words at
all. But she found herself, afterward, in possession of an impression so
clear that one would think it must have needed a long exchange of
unreserved confidences to have produced it. The man's mother loved him,
of course; one might take that for granted. And was proud of him; of
course--perhaps--again. But beyond all that, she rejoiced in him; in his
emancipation from the line and precept which had so tightly confined her;
in his very vagabondage.

She was not much in his confidence, though. Mary had made that out from
the way she had received her own resume of the status of his opera. His
mother had known nothing of his hopes, neither when Paula raised them
up nor later when she cast them down. It was odd about that--and rather
pitiable. She would have welcomed her son's confidences, Mary was sure,
with so real a sympathy, if he could only have believed it. But the
crust of family tradition was too thick, she supposed, to make even the
attempt possible.

This failure of his fully to understand the person traditionally the
nearest and dearest to him in all the world had, upon Mary's mind, the
effect of, somehow, solidifying him; making him more completely human to
her--where it might have been expected to work the other way. It proved
the last touch she needed to quicken the concern she had from the
beginning felt for him into an entirely real thing, a motivating
principle. If it was possible to get that opera of his produced, she was
going to do it.

She stopped at the Dearborn Avenue house on her way down-town to get her
little portable typewriter and carry it out to Ravinia with her. In the
odd hours of the next few days she copied March's libretto in English,
triple spaced, out of his score and this, with a lead pencil, she took to
carrying around with her to Paula's rehearsals, to her dressing-room,
everywhere. A phrase at a time, syllable by syllable, she began putting
it into French.

On the last Saturday night in June the Ravinia season opened with _Tosca_
sung in Italian; Paula singing the title part and Fournier as "Scarpia."
A veteran American tenor, Wilbur Hastings, an old Ravinia f