"No," Mary told her. "It's here. When I closed up the house, I brought it along. He might be interested enough in it I should think," she persisted, "if you and Mr. LaChaise told him how good it was,—to learn it in English. Or it might, I suppose,—the whole thing I mean,—be translated into French. There might, anyhow, prove to be something we could do."
"Good heavens, child!" Paula said, "we're up to the eyes now, all three of us. Will be for weeks as far as that goes. We simply couldn't think of it." Through a yawn she added, "Not that it wouldn't be a nice thing to do if we had time."
Paula's notion of getting March to come up and tune her piano was not damped at all by the wet blanket of Mary's objection to it. From town that day, Mary having driven her in for more fittings and photographers, Paula telephoned to the Fullerton Avenue house and later told Mary in an acutely dissatisfied manner that she had got simply nowhere with the person with whom she had talked. "She pretends,—oh, it was his sister or his mother, I suppose,—that they don't know anything whatever about him. Haven't seen him for ever so long. Haven't an idea how to get word to him. If only I had time to drive out there … But I haven't a minute of course."
Mary observed that she didn't see what good it would do to be told in person what Paula had just learned over the telephone. She could drive out there herself if there was any point in it, during the hour when Paula was engaged with her dressmaker.
Paula jumped at this suggestion. She was one of those persons whom telephones never quite convince. So Mary, rather glad of the errand, though convinced of its futility so far as Paula's designs were concerned, drove out to the Fullerton Avenue house and presently found herself in a small neat parlor talking to a neat old lady who was not, perhaps, as old as she looked, about Anthony March.
For anything that bore upon the obtainability of his service for the Ravinia piano the telephone conversation would have done as well. His mother had seen him for only a short time, a little more than a week ago and judged from what he then said that he was upon the point of going away, though not for a long absence—a month, perhaps. She had not asked where he meant to go and he had volunteered nothing. It was possible that he did not know himself.
Mary remained in doubt, for the first five minutes or so of her call, whether the stiff guarded precision of this was a mark of hostility to the whole Wollaston clan or whether it was nothing but undiluted New England reserve. She ventured a tentative, "I suppose he didn't say especially why he was going," and on getting a bare negative in reply, went on, a little breathlessly:—"I didn't mean that impertinently;—only all of us were very much interested in him and we liked him too well, especially father and I, to be content to lose track of him. I hope he wasn't ill;—didn't go away because of that."
"He told me that he was not," Mrs. March answered. "Though if I might have had my way with him, I would have put him to bed for a week. However," she added, with a fine smile, "I never did have my way with him and neither has his father had his. And I judge it to be as well that we have not."
No, there was no hostility about it. She perceived the genuineness in her visitor's concern and was perhaps really touched by it. But even so she was sparing of details. Anthony had never lived a life regulated by rule and habit. He worked at his music much too hard when the call, as she termed it, was upon him, and obviously quite forgot to take proper care of himself. And then he went away, as on this occasion, to recuperate in his own manner.
Mary adventured again just as she was getting up to take her leave. "It must want a good courage," she said, "to let him go like that; not to keep trying, at least, to hold him back in sheltered ways."