“Oh, Michael!” Stella laughed reprovingly. “Don’t put on that professorial or priestly air or whatever you call it, because if you ever want confidences from me you’ll have just to be humbly sympathetic.”
Michael sternly demanded if she had been keeping up her music, which made Stella dance about the studio in tempestuous mirth.
“I don’t see anything to giggle at in such a question,” Michael grumbled, and simultaneously reproached himself for a method of obloquy so cheap. “Anyway, you never talk about your music now, and whatever you may say, you don’t practice as much as you used. Why?”
For answer Stella sat down at the piano, and played over and over again the latest popular song until Michael walked out of the studio in a rage.
A few days later at breakfast he broached the subject of going away into the country.
“My dear boy, I’m much too busy with the Bazaar,” said Mrs. Fane.
“I don’t think I can possibly get away until August, and then I’ve half promised to go to Dinard with Mrs. Carruthers. She has just taken up Mental Science—so interesting and quite different from Christian Science.”
“I hate these mock-turtle religions,” said Michael savagely.
Mrs. Fane replied that Michael must learn a little toleration in very much the same tone as she might have suggested a little Italian.