Part 1 (2/2)

There was then no valid reason--no reason at all unless she were willing to go rummaging in that dark room of her mind for it--why John should always wince like that when one reminded him of Mary. It was a fact, though, that he did, and his sister was too honest-minded to pretend she did not know it.

He answered her question now evenly enough. ”She's working harder than ever, she says, closing up her office. She wants some more money, of course. And _she's_ heard from Rush. He's coming home. He may be turning up almost any day now. She hopes to get a wire from him so that she can meet him in New York and have a little visit with him, she says, before he comes on here.”

It was on Miss Wollaston's tongue to ask crisply, ”Why doesn't she come home herself now that her Fund is shutting up shop?” But that would have been to state in so many words the naked question they tacitly left unasked. There was another idea in her brother's mind that she thought she could deal with. He had betrayed it by the emphasis he put on the fact that it was to Mary and not to himself that Rush had written the news that he was coming home. Certainly there was nothing in that.

”Why,” she asked brightly, ”don't you go to New York yourself and meet him?”

He answered instantly, almost sharply, ”I can't do that.” Then not liking the way it sounded in his own ear, he gave her a reason. ”If you knew the number of babies that are coming along within the next month....”

”You need a rest,” she said, ”badly. I don't see how you live through horrors like that. But there must be other people--somebody who can take your work for you for a while. It can't make all that difference.”

”It wouldn't,” he admitted, ”nine times out of ten. That call I got last evening that broke up the dinner party,--an intern at the County Hospital would have done just as well as I. There was nothing to it at all. Oh, it was a sort of satisfaction to the husband's feelings, I suppose, to pay me a thousand dollars and be satisfied that n.o.body in town could have paid more and got anything better. But you see, you never can tell. The case I was called in on at four o'clock this morning was another thing altogether.” A gleam had come into his eyes again as over the memory of some brilliantly successful audacity. The gray old look had gone out of his face.

”I don't altogether wonder that Pollard blew up,” he added, ”except that a man in that profession has got no business to--ever.”

The coffee urn offered Miss Wollaston her only means of escape but she didn't avail herself of it. She let herself go on looking for a breathless minute into her brother's face. Then she asked weakly, ”What was it?”

”Why, Pollard....” John Wollaston began but then he stopped short and listened. ”I thought I heard Paula coming,” he explained.

”Paula won't be down for hours,” Miss Wollaston said, ”but I do not see why she shouldn't hear, since she is a married woman and your own wife....”

Her brother's ”Precisely” cut across that sentence with a snick like a pair of shears and left a little silence behind it.

”I think she'll be along in a minute,” he went on. ”She always does come to breakfast. Why did you think she wouldn't to-day?”

This was one of Miss Wollaston's minor crosses. The fact was that on the comparatively rare occasions when Doctor John himself was present for the family breakfast at the custom-consecrated hour, Paula managed about two times in five to put in a last-minute appearance. This was not what annoyed Miss Wollaston. She was broad-minded enough to be aware that to an opera singer, the marshaling of one's whole family in the dining-room at eight o'clock in the morning might seem a barbarous and revolting practise and even occasional submissions to it, acts of real devotion.

She was not really bitterly annoyed either by Paula's oft repeated a.s.sertion that she always came to breakfast. Paula was one of those temperamental persons who have to be forgiven for treating their facts--atmospherically. But that John, a man of science, enlisted under the banner of truth, should back this a.s.sertion of his wife's, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, really required resignation to put up with; argued a blindness, an infatuation, which seemed to his sister hardly decent. Because after all, facts were facts, and you didn't alter them by pretending that they did not exist.

So instead of answering her brother's question, she sat a little straighter in her chair, and compressed her lips.

He smiled faintly at that and added, ”Anyhow she said she'd be along in a minute or two.”

”Oh,” said Miss Wollaston, ”you have wakened her then. I would have suggested that the poor child be left asleep this morning.”

Now he saw that she had something to tell him. ”Nothing went wrong last night after I left, I hope.”

”Oh, not wrong,” Miss Wollaston conceded, ”only the Whitneys went of course, when you did and the Byrnes, and Wallace Hood, but Portia Stanton and that new husband of hers stayed. It was his doing, I suppose. You might have thought he was waiting all the evening for just that thing to happen. They went up to Paula's studio--Paula invited me, of course, but I excused myself--and they played and sang until nearly two o'clock this morning. It was all perfectly natural, I suppose. And still I did think that Paula might have sung earlier, down in the drawing-room when you asked her to.”

”She was perfectly right to refuse.” He caught his sister up rather short on that, ”I shouldn't have asked her. It was very soon after dinner. They weren't a musical crowd anyway, except Novelli. It's utterly unfair to expect a person like Paula to perform unless she happens to be in the mood for it. At that she's extremely amiable about it; never refuses unless she has some real reason. What her reason was last night, I don't know, but you may be perfectly sure it was sufficient.”

He would have realized that he was protesting too much even if he had not read that comment in his sister's face. But somehow he couldn't have pulled himself up but for old Nat's appearance with the platter of ham and eggs and the first installment of the wheat cakes. He was really hungry and he settled down to them in silence.

And, watching him between the little bites of dry toast and sips of coffee, Miss Wollaston talked about Portia Stanton. Everybody, indeed, was talking about Portia these days but Miss Wollaston had a special privilege. She had known Portia's mother rather well,--Naomi Rutledge Stanton, the suffrage leader, she was--and she had always liked and admired Portia; liked her better than the younger and more sensational daughter, Rose.

Miss Wollaston hoped, hoped with all her heart that Portia had not made a tragic mistake in this matter of her marriage. She couldn't herself quite see how a sensible girl like Portia could have done anything so reckless as to marry a romantic young Italian pianist, ten years at least her junior. It couldn't be denied that the experiment seemed to have worked well so far. Portia certainly seemed happy enough last night; contented. There was a sort of glow about her there never was before. But the question was how long would it last. How long would it be before those big brown Italian eyes began looking soulfully at somebody else; somebody more....

It was here that Miss Wollaston chopped herself off short, hearing--this time it was no false alarm--Paula's step in the hall. She'd have been amazed, scandalized, profoundly indignant, dear good-hearted lady that she was, had some expert in the psychology of the unconscious pointed out to her that the reason she had begun talking about Portia was that it gave her an outlet for expressing her misgivings about her own brother's marriage. Paula, of course, was a different thing altogether.

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