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England was full of Constitutionality and Freethinking; Tolands, Collinses, Wollastons, Bolingbrokes, still living; very free indeed. England, one is astonished to see, has its royal-republican ways of doing; something Roman in it, from Peerage down to Plebs; strange and curious to the eye of M. de Voltaire.
At times she appeared passionless, so completely did her intellect dominate, and so superior was she to all the little arts and weaknesses of women; but this was a criticism she contradicted continually. There was very little society at the Wollastons', but occasionally a few friends called. One evening there was a little party, and the conversation flagged.
Her amusement was the stock market and she played it cannily and with considerable success with his rather diabolic encouragement. She was in New York when March got home, and he saw her for the first time since his return at his father's house on a Sunday morning more than a fortnight after the evening at the Wollastons' when Paula had sung his songs.
And then, petulantly, she accused him of laughing at her, of refusing to take her seriously, of trying to be clever like the Wollastons. "Look here, Paula," he said, and he put so much edge into his tone that she did, "have you ever spent five minutes out of the last five years trying to think what John was, besides your husband? I don't believe it.
"I must be running and so must you. I'd take you with me only we go different ways. Carry your score along to the Wollastons. That's the first step to the princess, I guess." The episode upon which March had built the opera he called The Outcry, was one that was current during the autumn of 1914.
By the time he had got to work on her own piano, she knew he was pure gold and settled down joyously to make the most of him. It was not until she attempted to give an account to the Wollastons at dinner that night, of the day they had spent together for they had made a day of it that she realized there was anything odd, not to say astonishing, about the episode.
"I am angry," she admitted, "or I was, and just exactly about that. It's queer the way you Wollastons, you and your father, anyhow, are always getting through to things like that. What you say is fair enough. I guess you're always fair. Can't help being, somehow. But I can't put off telephoning to Max. You see I called up John at Hickory Hill an hour ago.
She left behind her, in that Victorian drawing-room, a silence that tingled. A crisis of this sort was just what the Wollastons needed to tune them up. The four of them, for Lucile had to be counted in, met the enemy which is to say their arriving guests with an unbroken front. They explained Paula's non-appearance with good-humored unconcern.
Only it would have amused an invisible spectator to note how those three Wollastons, blonde, dolichocephalic, high-strung, magnetically susceptible, responded, as strips of gold-leaf to the static electricity about a well rubbed amber rod, to the influence that emanated from that silent figure on the sofa.
Parodies whose originals they failed to recognize, experiments in the whole-tone scale that would have interested disciples of Debussy, but his rhythms they understood and recognized as faultless. And Mary danced. With Graham when she must, with Rush when she could. The latter happened oftener than you would have supposed. "Those Wollastons can certainly dance," Sylvia remarked to her brother.
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