During the first week of his almost daily visits to the house, he got repeated intimations of her, a glimpse once through an open door on the third floor into a room that struck him as being, probably, hers. The impression, once more, when he was coming down from the music room that this was the door which he had just heard softly shut as if some one, the princess herself, of course, who had stood listening to the music for a while, had withdrawn there when she heard his step on the stairs. Once on the settee in the hall he saw a riding crop and a small beaver hat that he felt a curious certainty belonged to her and once out of a confusion of young voices in the drawing-room, and a dance tune going on the Victrola, he heard some one call out her name, hers he was sure though he didn't hear her answer. Perhaps she had answered without speaking. The dumb princess again.
Then suddenly even these faint hints of her presence ceased, and he remarked their absence with a troubled wonder until one day Paula volunteered the statement that Mary had gone away on a visit for a month or two, out to Wyoming, where a great friend of hers, Olive Corbett, and her husband had a ranch.
By asking a few intelligent questions, he could have found out a lot more about her from Paula for she was disposed to talk freely enough about the family life she was so oddly enclosed in, and their perpetual quarrels about the opera never carried over into their breathing spells. In the long hours of their almost daily sessions the occasional rests made up quite a total and March accumulated a lot of information about Paula herself.
Indeed it was not quite as idle as that sounds. Paula talked to him thirstily, gave him somehow the impression that she had had no one for a good many years with whom she could converse without reservation in her own idiom.
She came, he learned, of a Virginia family which had migrated during her early childhood to California. It was obvious that they were well-bred, but equally so that they were not very competent. The victims, he judged, of a lot of played-out southern ideas and traditions. They were still living and March allowed himself to guess that they were one of the minor reasons why Doctor John had to earn a lot of money.
Paula with her splendid physique and gorgeous voice must have looked to them like the family hope. They had managed at considerable sacrifice to send her abroad, but evidently without any idea of the time and the money it takes to erect even the most promising material into a genuine success. After a year or two, she had been abandoned to make her way as best she could.
Even now that they were safely consigned to the past, Paula could not talk about the shifts and hardships of that time with any relish. The discouragements must have sunk in pretty deep. She hinted—it was not the sort of topic she could discourse candidly about—that the blackest of those discouragements had come from the amorous advances of men who had it in their power to open opportunities to her but wanted a quid pro quo.
He asked her in that connection whether during those hard times she had never felt inclined to fall in love on her own account.
"I never cared a snap of my fingers for any man," she said with obvious sincerity, "until I saw John."
This slowness of her erotic development surprised him rather until he evoked the explanation that her energies had been concentrated upon her musical ambition. Music, since she was a real musician, had been a genuine emotional outlet for her.