After he had gone, she went back and sang through the score of Marguerite as if she had had no interruption a little over an hour and a half ago. A little over an hour and a half—had so short a time passed since she had seen Grant, had decided so much, had let so much go out of her life? She could not evoke even a shiver over the blotting out of that vista of her dreams, nothing but a little impatient frown. Things had no right to get so dead, after having been so alive. Lovely girl, that Félicie Durant; even if Jerry did call her a jellyfish. Her arguments were clear—to marry now when she had four good years before her which marriage could not replace——Her voice hesitated on a measure. It sounded almost like her argument with Grant—three years and a half from her life at this time, which marriage could not replace—— “Oh, but that’s different,” and her voice caught up with the piano accompaniment and spun heart-satisfying melody— “Je ris—de me voir Si belle—en ce miroir——” VIII “Say, Joy, can’t you practice your trilling with the door shut?” Sarah and Joy had met in the kitchenette, about four-thirty in the afternoon. Their encounters were always a matter of routine, and to-day they both happened to strike the same time to search for “afternoon tea.” Sarah had just come to light, and was yawning about in a wrinkled kimono, her hair done up in curlers, her face pettishly grey. There was something positively undressed about Sarah’s face at times like these. Joy had been uptown all day, first at Pa’s, then at her French and Italian lessons. Returning, she had been practicing a trill exercise, not aware that Sarah was arising a little later than usual. “I’m sorry,” she said now, and chewed a cold English muffin—the kind one buys at the corner delicatessen. “I usually close the door when I practice, anyway. I didn’t think anyone was home.” “It certainly is nerve-racking to live in the house with a singer,” Sarah complained. She had caught sight of her face in a mirror, which added to the drag of her voice. “Of course I know you have to practice and all that, Joy, but now that your voice has gotten so much bigger it carries everywhere—simply everywhere!” “Glad to hear it, that’s what I’m after,” snapped Joy, and bit into another discouraged muffin. “It’s hard enough to work all the time without being picked on for it. To hear you talk, you’d think I sang all day.” “Now you’re getting cross. I suppose singers have to be temperamental, though.” Receiving no response to this, Sarah twirled her infinitesimal braid and tried again: “It’s funny to see you try to be so earnest. No girl with the looks you know you have can stand the strain of the student’s life without weakening and breaking away once in a while. And you can’t tell me that you and that Jim Dalton go to concerts every time you leave here.”