he cottage, but the contented lazy tone in which Paula from
up-stairs answered her hail, made it plain that her tardiness had not
been remarked. However Paula had spent her day, the upshot of it was
satisfactory.

"Shall I come up?" Mary asked.

"Come along," Paula answered. "I'm not asleep or anything and besides I
want to talk to you."

"I think I got everything you want," Mary said from Paula's doorway, "or
if not exactly, what will do just about as well."

Paula, stretched out on the bed rather more than half undressed, with the
contented languor of a well fed lioness yet with some passion or other
smoldering in her eyes, made no pretense at being interested in Mary's
success in executing her commissions.

"I had Max to lunch to-day," she said. "I knew you hated him and then it
was complicated enough anyway. I suppose it might have been better if I'd
told you so right out instead of making up all those things for you to do
in town, but I couldn't quite find the words to put it in somehow and I
had to have it out with him. He's been nagging at me for a week and he's
going away to-morrow. He's given me until then to think it over."

There was no use trying to hurry Paula. Mary took off her hat, lighted a
cigarette and settled herself in the room's only comfortable chair before
she asked, "Think what over?"

"Oh, the whole thing," said Paula. "What he's been harping on for the
last week.--He _is_ a loathsome sort of beast," she conceded after a
little pause. "But he's right about this. Absolutely."

Was her father ever fretted, Mary wondered, by this sort of thing? Did
his nerves draw tight, and his muscles, too, waiting for the idea behind
these perambulations to emerge?

"I can imagine a lot of things that Mr. Maxfield Ware would be right
about," she observed. "Which one is this?"

"About me," said Paula. "About what I'd have to do if I wanted to get
anywhere. He thinks I've a good chance to get into the very first class,
along with Garden and Farrar and so on. And unless I can do that, there's
no good going on. I'd never be happy as a second rater. Well, that's
true. And my only chance of getting to the top, he says, is in being
managed just right. I guess that's true, too. He says that if I take this
Metropolitan contract that LaChaise has been talking about, go down to
New York as one of their 'promising young American sopranos' to sing on
off-nights and fill in and make myself generally useful, I simpl