She tried to say something like this to her father, but didn't feel sure that she quite had his attention. He did quiet down again however and resumed his seat at the foot of the tree. Presently he said:
"She's doing it for me. Because my incompetence has forced it upon her. She'd have taken the other thing; had really chosen it." Then without a pause, but with a new intensity he shot in a question. "That's true, isn't it? She meant what she said over the telephone?" As Mary hesitated over her answer he added rather grimly, "You can be quite candid about it. I don't know which answer I want."
"She meant every word she said over the telephone," Mary assured him.
"You couldn't doubt that if you had seen her as I did afterward."
She didn't pretend though that this was the complete answer. The reflective tone in which she spoke made it clear that there was more to it than that.
"Go on," John said, "tell me the rest of it. I think, perhaps, you understand her better than I do."
Mary took her time about going on and she began a little doubtfully. "I always begin by being unjust to Paula," she said. "That's my instinct, I suppose, reproaching her for not doing what she would do if she were like me. But afterward when I think her out, I believe I understand her pretty well."
"Paula exaggerates," she went on after another reflective pause. "She must see things large in order to move among them in a large way. Her gestures, those of her mind I mean, are—sweeping. If she weren't so good-natured, our—hair-splitting ways would annoy her. Then it's necessary for her to feel that she's—conquering something."
That last word was barely audible and the quality of the silence which followed it drew John Wollaston's gaze which had been straying over the lake, around to the speaker. She had been occupying her hands while she talked, collecting tiny twigs and acorn cups that happened to be within reach but now she was tensely still and paler than her wont, he thought.
"You needn't be afraid to say what's in your mind," he assured her.
"It wasn't that," she told him. "I realized that I had been quoting somebody else. Anthony March said once of Paula that if she had not been an artist she might have been a dompteuse."