He agreed with her.  “I knew when it happened,” he added.  “It happened when I heard Paula Carresford sing one of my songs.  Do you remember the story that used to be in the school reader about the tiger that tasted blood and ate up the princess?  You know, Jennie, it’s practically true that up to that night I’d never heard any of my music at all—­except mutilated fragments of it as I played it myself.  And I’ll tell you it was a staggering experience.  The queerest experience I ever had in my life, too.  I’ll tell you about that sometime.  But I changed right there, just the way the tiger did.  I don’t happen to want a fur overcoat nor an automobile nor an apartment on the Drive.  I honestly don’t want them.  They aren’t a part of my dreams—­never were.  But I do want to hear my own music.  I want to hear it done for all it’s worth.  I want to hear orchestras play it and singers as good as Paula Carresford sing it.  And in order to do that I’ve got to look ahead a little.  I’ve got to stop doing always exactly as I damned please.  I’ve got to do things because somebody besides myself wants them done.”

“Have you got something like that to do to-day—­with an eye to the consequences?” she asked.

He looked sharply around at her.  She was very intent on her driving just then.  “That’s a remarkably good guess in a way,” he said.  “I dread going to that house to lunch.  A month ago I’d have refused—­or pretended I hadn’t got the invitation until too late.  And I’d have pretended to myself that it was because I didn’t care to play the social game; didn’t want to take on obligations of a kind I couldn’t meet.  But now I’ve told Mrs. Wollaston I’d come, I know the real reason why I don’t want to.

“I said just now I didn’t want a fur overcoat nor an automobile, and that’s eighty percent true.  And yet, there’s a crawly little snob inside me that’s in a panic right now because I haven’t got proper clothes to wear and because I’m going to have to sit down in front of a lot of funny shaped forks that I don’t know the special uses of.

“Oh, there’s more to it than that of course.  It’s rather a cross-grained situation.  Wollaston doesn’t like me.  He thinks I’m responsible for his wife’s having kicked over the traces and signed up to sing at Ravinia this summer.  In a way, I suppose I am.  She’s planning to use that opera of mine, you remember,—­The Outcry we called it—­for a novelty, provided they like the way I’ve padded up her part.  The big role in it is really for the baritone, of course.  That’s what I’ve been slaving over for the last two weeks.  If she makes a hit with it, she’ll take it to the Metropolitan next winter.  Of course, there’s no reason in God’s world why she shouldn’t do that if she can get away with it.  She hasn’t any children to look after; she told me she didn’t even keep house for her husband.  All the same he regards me as a sort of potential homewrecker.”

“You can’t quite blame him for that, can you?” Jennie suggested.  “If you began reading a story about a beautiful young opera singer who left her husband to go back on the stage again and sing an opera by a musical genius she’d discovered, wouldn’t you expect them to fall in love with each other?”