At that Mary laughed in a recoil of genuine amusement.  She could imagine that Anthony March would laugh himself.  In one particular Paula was unquestionably right.  He wouldn’t feel insulted.  He was just the last person in the world to be accessible to such a petty emotion.

She returned Paula’s hug and extricated herself from the chair.

“You needn’t worry about me, at all events,” she said.  “I’m not tired a bit.  But could we worry a little about Mr. March?  About his opera, I mean?  Don’t you suppose we could get Mr. LaChaise to put it on?  The way he originally wrote it.—­I mean for somebody else to sing.”

“Fournier could sing it in a rather interesting way,” Paula remarked speculatively.  “Only I don’t believe he’d sing in English.  Certainly there’s nobody else.”

“Perhaps if he saw the score ...”  Mary began.

“Gracious!” Paula broke in, a little startled, not much.  “I haven’t an idea where that score is.  I may have sent it back to him, but I don’t believe I did.”

“No,” Mary told her.  “It’s here.  When I closed up the house, I brought it along.  He might be interested enough in it I should think,” she persisted, “if you and Mr. LaChaise told him how good it was,—­to learn it in English.  Or it might, I suppose,—­the whole thing I mean,—­be translated into French.  There might, anyhow, prove to be something we could do.”

“Good heavens, child!” Paula said, “we’re up to the eyes now, all three of us.  Will be for weeks as far as that goes.  We simply couldn’t think of it.”  Through a yawn she added, “Not that it wouldn’t be a nice thing to do if we had time.”

Paula’s notion of getting March to come up and tune her piano was not damped at all by the wet blanket of Mary’s objection to it.  From town that day, Mary having driven her in for more fittings and photographers, Paula telephoned to the Fullerton Avenue house and later told Mary in an acutely dissatisfied manner that she had got simply nowhere with the person with whom she had talked.  “She pretends,—­oh, it was his sister or his mother, I suppose,—­that they don’t know anything whatever about him.  Haven’t seen him for ever so long.  Haven’t an idea how to get word to him.  If only I had time to drive out there ...  But I haven’t a minute of course.”

Mary observed that she didn’t see what good it would do to be told in person what Paula had just learned over the telephone.  She could drive out there herself if there was any point in it, during the hour when Paula was engaged with her dressmaker.

Paula jumped at this suggestion.  She was one of those persons whom telephones never quite convince.  So Mary, rather glad of the errand, though convinced of its futility so far as Paula’s designs were concerned, drove out to the Fullerton Avenue house and presently found herself in a small neat parlor talking to a neat old lady who was not, perhaps, as old as she looked, about Anthony March.