e that did not make itself fairly heard to her conscious ear, that
he would be made very fluttered and unhappy by it whether he granted her
request or not.

What he would hate, she perceived, was the suddenness of the demand and
the irrevocable committal to those five years; the blow it was to those
domesticities and proprieties he loved so much. The fact that he would be
made sponsor for those unchartered excursions to Mexico, to South
America, and so on, under the direction of a libidinous looking
cosmopolite like Maxfield Ware.

Why she wanted to put Wallace into the flutters she couldn't have told.
She was, as I say, not quite aware that she did. But he had been running
up a score in very minute items that was all of five years old. The fact
that all these items went by the name of services, helpful little acts of
kindness, made the irritation they caused her all the more acute.

I don't agree with Lucile Wollaston's diagnosis, that Paula could not
abide Wallace merely because he refused to lose his head over her, but
there was a grain of truth in it. What she unconsciously resented was the
fundamental unreality of his attitude to her. Actually, he did not like
her, but the relation he had selected as appropriate to the first Mrs.
Wollaston's successor was one of innocent devotion and he stuck,
indefatigably, to the pose. So the chance to put his serviceability to
the proof in consternating circumstances like these, afforded her a
subtle satisfaction. He'd brought it upon himself, hadn't he? At least it
was he and no other who had put Mary up to the part she had played.

None of this, of course, came to the surface at all in the scene between
them. She was gentler than was her wont with him, very appealing, subdued
nearer to his own scale of manners than he had ever seen her before. But
she did not, for a fact, allow him much time to think.

He asked her, with a touch of embarrassment, whether John was fully in
her confidence concerning this startling project, and if she had won his
assent to it.

"He knows all about it," she said--and with no consciousness of a
_suppressio veri_ here. "We hardly talked of anything else all last
night. I didn't get to sleep till four. He doesn't like it, but then you
couldn't expect he would. For that matter neither do I. Oh, you don't
know how I hate it! But I think he sees it has to be. Anyhow, he didn't
try very hard to keep me from going on with it--And Mary, of course, is