al whenever any one asked him any questions.
He was a sufficiently well-known figure in that world for surmises to
spring up like round-eyed dandelions wherever he trod.

It wasn't long before everybody knew, despite the concealments which his
ponderous diplomacy never cast aside, that his objective was Paula. She
divined this before he had made a single overt move in her direction and
pointed it out to Mary with a genuine pleasure sounding through the tone
of careless amusement she chose to adopt.

"You wouldn't have anything to do with a person like that, would you?"
Mary was startled into exclaiming. "Of course, if he were genuinely what
he pretends to be and the things he boasts were true...."

"Oh, he's genuine enough," said Paula. "A quarter to a half as good as he
pretends and that's as well as the whole of that lot will average. Though
he isn't the sort you and John would take to, for a fact."

It was not the first time Mary had found herself bracketed with her
father in just this way. It wasn't a sneering way, hardly hostile. But
Mary by the second or third repetition began reading an important
significance into it. Paula in her instinctive fashion was beginning to
weigh alternatives, one life against the other, a thing it wasn't likely
she had ever attempted before.

There was a tension between John and Paula which Mary saw mounting daily
over the question of his next visit to Ravinia. Paula wanted him, was
getting restless, moody, as nearly as it was possible for her to be
ill-natured over his abstention. Yet it was evident enough that she had
not invited him to come; furthermore, that she meant not to invite him.
Once Mary would have put this down to mere coquetry but this explanation
failed now to satisfy altogether. There was something that lay deeper
than that. Some sort of strain between them dating back, she surmised, to
the talk her father had referred to down in North Carolina in the jocular
assertion that he had told Paula she would have to begin now supporting
the family. Had the same topic come up again during his visit to Ravinia?

The perception of this strain in their relation increased Mary's
reluctance to bring the topic up herself, in default of a lead from
Paula, out of nowhere. It almost seemed as if Paula consciously avoided
giving her such a lead, sheered away whenever she found they were
"getting warm" in that direction.

There were hours when the undertaking she had committed hers