o feel rather
indignant against an attitude toward women which had only two categories;
did she offer amorous possibilities or not. An attitude that had no half
lights in it, no delicate tints of chivalry nor romance. LaChaise would
do nothing for the sake of her blue eyes. He had no interest whatever in
that indeterminate, unstable emotional compound that goes, between men
and women, by the name of friendship.

She tried to call this beastly and feel indignant about it, but somehow
that emotion didn't respond. She had more real sympathy for and
understanding of an attitude like that than she had for one like
Graham's. It was simpler and more natural. It involved you in no such
labyrinths of farfetched absurdities and exasperating cross-purposes as
Graham's did.

It was characteristically,--wasn't it?--a Latin attitude; or would it be
fairer to say that its antithesis as exemplified by Graham was a northern
specialty? She extracted quite a bit of amusement from observing some of
the results of individual failures to understand this fundamental
difference, all the more after she had Jimmy Wallace to share
observations with. He was a dramatic critic, but he consented to take a
fatherly, or better avuncular, interest in the Ravinia season during the
month of his musical colleague's vacation.

The special episode they focused upon was Violet Williamson's flirtation
with Fournier. She was a pretty woman, still comfortably on the east side
of forty, socially one of the inner ring, spoiled, rather, by an
enthusiastic husband but not, thanks to her own good sense, very
seriously. James Wallace was an old and very special friend of hers and
she commandeered his services as soon as he appeared at Ravinia, in her
campaign for possession of the French baritone.

Mary had reflected over this and talked it out pretty thoroughly with
Jimmy before it occurred to her that she might be able to turn it to her
own account--or rather to her lover's. For that matter, why not, while
she had him under her hand, recruit Jimmy as an aid in the campaign?

"Do you mind being used for ulterior purposes?" she asked him.

He intimated that he did not if they were amusing, as any of Mary's were
pretty sure to be.

"I'm interested in an opera," she told him, "or rather, I'm very much
interested in a man who has written one. Father and I have agreed that
he's a great person and everybody seems willing to admit that he's a
musical genius. Paula c