Mary Wollaston | Page 5

tunic of ecru colored silk that she had pulled on over her
head, with a little over-dress of corn colored tulle, weighted artfully
here and there that it mightn't fly away. And a string of big lumpish
amber beads. She could have got into that costume in about two
minutes and there was probably next to nothing under it. From the
on-looker's point of view, it mightn't violate decorum at all; indeed,
clearly did not. But Miss Wollaston herself, if she hadn't been more or

less rigidly laced, stayed, gartered, pinched, pried and pulled about; if
she could have moved freely in any direction without an
admonitory--"take care"--from some bit of whalebone somewhere,
wouldn't have felt dressed at all. There ought to be something
perpetually penitential about clothes. The biblical story of the fall of
man made that clear, didn't it?
John sprang up as his wife came into the room; went around the table
and held her chair for her. "My dear, I didn't know I was robbing you of
half a night's sleep," he said. "You should have turned me out."
She reached up her strong white arms (the tulle sleeves did fall away
from them rather alarmingly, and Miss Wollaston concentrated her
attention on the spiggot of the coffee urn) for his head as he bent over
her and pulled it down for a kiss.
"I didn't need any more sleep. I had such a joyous time last night. I sang
the whole of _Maliela_, and a lot of Thais. I don't know what all.
Novelli's a marvel; the best accompanist I've found yet. But, oh, my
darling, I did feel such a pig about it."
He was back in his own chair by now and his sister breathed a little
more freely.
"Pig?" he asked.
"Oh, because you weren't there," said Paula. "Because I didn't sing
before, when you asked me to."
"Dearest!" John remonstrated,--pleased though with the apology, you
could see with half an eye,--"it was inexcusable of me to have asked
you. It was a dull crowd from a musical point of view. The only thing I
minded was having, myself, put you into a position where you had to
refuse. I am glad you were able to make it up to yourself after."
"That was not why I didn't," Paula said. She always spoke rather
deliberately and never interrupted any one. "I mean it wasn't because
the others weren't especially musical. But I couldn't have sung without

asking Novelli to play. And he couldn't have refused--being new and a
little on trial you know. And that drawing-room piano, so badly out of
tune, would have been terrible for him. There's no knowing what he
mightn't have done."
John's face beamed triumph. "I might have known you had an unselfish
reason for it," he said. He didn't look at his sister but, of course, the
words slanted her way.
It was perfectly characteristic of Miss Wollaston that she did not,
however, make any immediate attempt to set herself right. She attended
first very competently to all of Paula's wants in the way of breakfast
and saw her fairly launched on her chilled grapefruit. Then she said, "A
man is coming to tune the piano this morning."
It was more than a statement of fact. Indeed I despair of conveying to
you all the implications and moral reflections which Miss Wollaston
contrived to pack into that simple sentence.
The drawing-room piano was what an artillerist would speak of as one
of the sensitive points along the family front. It had been a present to
the Wollaston household from the eldest of John's brothers, the
unmarried one Miss Wollaston had kept house for so many years before
he died; the last present, it turned out, he ever made to anybody. Partly
perhaps, because it was a sacred object, the Wollaston children took to
treating it rather irreverently. The "Circassian grand" was one of its
nicknames and the "Siamese Elephant" another. It did glare in the
otherwise old-fashioned Dearborn Avenue drawing-room and its case
did express a complete recklessness of expense rather than any more
austere esthetic impulse.
Paula ignored it in rather a pointed way; being a musician she might
have been expected to see that it was kept in tune. She had a piano of
her own up in the big room at the top of the house that had once been
the nursery and over this instrument, she made, Miss Wollaston felt, a
silly amount of fuss. Supposedly expert tuners were constantly being
called in to do things to it and nothing they did ever seemed to afford
Paula any satisfaction.

The aura that surrounded Miss Wollaston's remark included, then, the
conviction that the drawing-room piano, being a sacred memory,
couldn't be out of tune in the