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Mary's quarrel with Paula, though it never came off, never for that matter got through to Paula's consciousness, even as an approach to one, had, all the same, a chain of consequences and so deserves to be recorded. The opera management was supposed to supply Paula with a piano and they found one already installed in the Ravinia house when they moved in, a small grand of a widely advertised make.
On the last Saturday night in June the Ravinia season opened with Tosca sung in Italian; Paula singing the title part and Fournier as "Scarpia." A veteran American tenor, Wilbur Hastings, an old Ravinia favorite, sang "Cavaradossi." Taken as a whole, the performance was quite as good as any one has a right to expect any opening night to be.
There aren't many people who can travel steadily, or very far, on that motivation, and Paula was not one of them. From the moment when she took the plunge, ignored all but defied her husband's wishes, and signed the Ravinia contract, she ceased to be concerned for anything, broadly speaking, but her own success.
John detected a reservation of some sort in this afterthought; faintly ironic perhaps. There was, at any rate, a conspicuous absence of any implication that his presence was urgently needed just then, or eagerly waited for. He replied with an irony a little more marked, "It's an unexpected pleasure to find you here. They're wanting you rather badly up at Ravinia these days, I understand."
What a curious compound of nerve ends and gland activities a man's dreams that he lived by, or died for were! She pulled him out of his reverie by a deliberate movement of resolution, taking her hands away from her face, half rising and turning her chair so that she faced him squarely. "I want to know in so many words," she said, "why you're glad that I'm still bound to that Ravinia thing.
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