Mary Wollaston | Page 8

husband had been. His flash of jealousy over the little Italian pianist,
instantly recognizable through its careful disguise, had only endeared
John Wollaston to her further, if that were possible. She had laughed
and hugged his worried old head tight against her breast.
But his refusal to face facts about her musical career was another thing
altogether. Once more he had, patently and rather pitiably, evaded the
subject of her going seriously to work. Did he think that she could go
on indefinitely parading a parlor accomplishment for his society
friends,--singing nice little English songs for Wallace Hood? It was too
ridiculous! That hadn't been their understanding when she married him.
What she had been sure of last night as never before, she had tried
down there in the dining-room to convey to him; that her powers were
ripe, were crying out for use. She had failed simply because he had
refused to see what she was driving at. It was just another form of
jealousy really, she supposed.
She was not an introspective person, but this, clearly, was something
that wanted thinking over. It was to "think" that she went out for the
walk. Only, being Paula, the rhythm of her stride, the sparkle of the

spring air, the stream of sharp new-minted sensations incessantly
assailing eye and ear, soon swamped her problem; sunk it beneath the
level of consciousness altogether. Long before ten o'clock when she
came swinging along Dearborn Avenue toward her husband's house,
she had "walked off" her perplexities.
A block from the house she found herself overtaking a man in uniform
and slackened her pace a little in order not to pass him. There was
something unmilitary about the look of him that mildly amused her. It
was not that he slouched nor shuffled nor that he was ill-made, though
he was probably one of those unfortunates whom issue uniforms never
fit. He carried a little black leather satchel, and it broke over Paula that
here perhaps was Lucile's piano tuner. She half formed the intention to
stay away another hour or two until he should have had time to finish.
But he interfered with that plan by stopping in front of the house and
looking at it as if making up his mind whether to go in.
It was an odd look he had, but distinctly an engaging one. He was not
criticizing the architecture, if so it could be called, of the house-front.
Yet there was a sort of comfortable detachment about him which
precluded the belief that it was a mere paralyzing shyness that held him
there.
Paula abandoned her intention of walking by. She stopped instead as
she came up to him and said, "Are you coming in here? If you are, I'll
let you in." She fished an explanatory latch-key out of her wrist-bag as
she went up the steps.
"Why," he said, "I believe this is the house where I'm expected to tune
a piano."
In the act of thrusting home her key, Paula stopped short, turned
irrepressibly and stared at him. She was one of that very small number
of American-born singers who take the English language seriously and
she knew good speech when she heard it. It was one of the qualities
which had first attracted her to Doctor John. This man's speaking voice
would have arrested her attention pleasantly anywhere. Coming from
the private soldier Lucile had told to come round to tune the piano, it

really startled her. She turned back to the door and opened it.
"Yes," she said, "they're expecting you. Come in and I'll show you the
piano."
She might, of course, merely have indicated the drawing-room door to
him with a nod and gone up-stairs, but she was determined now to wait
and hear him say something more. So she led the way into the
drawing-room and quite superfluously indicated the Circassian grand
with a gesture. Then she looked back at him quickly enough to surprise
the expression that flickered across his face at the sight of it. A mere
cocking of one eyebrow it was, but amusingly expressive. So, too, was
the way he walked over toward it, with an air of cautious determination,
of readiness for anything, that made Paula want to laugh. He dropped
down sidewise on the bench, turned up the lid and dug his fingers into
the keyboard.
At the noise he evoked from that pampered instrument she did laugh
aloud. It was not a piano tuner's arpeggio but a curiously teasing mixed
dissonance she couldn't begin to identify. She thought she heard him
say, "My God!" but couldn't be sure. He repeated his chord pianissimo
and held it down, reached up and echoed it in the upper half of the
keyboard; then struck, hard, two octaves in