He got a little overflow from the fulness of her heart at that that would have rewarded him amply for a more arduous and less amusing prospect than he was committed to. It was always touch and go whether this summer plunge into musical criticism wouldn't bore him frightfully. Pretentious solemnities of any kind were hard for him to tolerate and an opera season is, of course, stuffed with these, even a democratized blue-penciled out-of-doors affair like this. It was a great relief to find him a mind as free from sentimental resonances as Mary Wollaston's swimming about in it. They saw eye to eye over a lot of things.
They were in whole-hearted agreement for example about a certain impresario, Maxfield Ware, who created a sensation among the company and staff by turning up ostentatiously unaccounted for from New York and looking intensely enigmatical whenever any one asked him any questions. He was a sufficiently well-known figure in that world for surmises to spring up like round-eyed dandelions wherever he trod.
It wasn't long before everybody knew, despite the concealments which his ponderous diplomacy never cast aside, that his objective was Paula. She divined this before he had made a single overt move in her direction and pointed it out to Mary with a genuine pleasure sounding through the tone of careless amusement she chose to adopt.
"You wouldn't have anything to do with a person like that, would you?" Mary was startled into exclaiming. "Of course, if he were genuinely what he pretends to be and the things he boasts were true…."
"Oh, he's genuine enough," said Paula. "A quarter to a half as good as he pretends and that's as well as the whole of that lot will average. Though he isn't the sort you and John would take to, for a fact."
It was not the first time Mary had found herself bracketed with her father in just this way. It wasn't a sneering way, hardly hostile. But Mary by the second or third repetition began reading an important significance into it. Paula in her instinctive fashion was beginning to weigh alternatives, one life against the other, a thing it wasn't likely she had ever attempted before.
There was a tension between John and Paula which Mary saw mounting daily over the question of his next visit to Ravinia. Paula wanted him, was getting restless, moody, as nearly as it was possible for her to be ill-natured over his abstention. Yet it was evident enough that she had not invited him to come; furthermore, that she meant not to invite him. Once Mary would have put this down to mere coquetry but this explanation failed now to satisfy altogether. There was something that lay deeper than that. Some sort of strain between them dating back, she surmised, to the talk her father had referred to down in North Carolina in the jocular assertion that he had told Paula she would have to begin now supporting the family. Had the same topic come up again during his visit to Ravinia?
The perception of this strain in their relation increased Mary's reluctance to bring the topic up herself, in default of a lead from Paula, out of nowhere. It almost seemed as if Paula consciously avoided giving her such a lead, sheered away whenever she found they were "getting warm" in that direction.
There were hours when the undertaking she had committed herself to with Wallace Hood seemed fantastic. Between two persons like her father and Paula a meddler could make such an incalculable amount of mischief. All the current maxims of conduct would support her in a refusal to interfere. It was exclusively their affair, wasn't it? Why not let them settle it in their own way?
Yet there were other hours when she put her procrastinations down to sheer cowardice. This occurred whenever she got a letter from her aunt at Hickory Hill.