She was not able, thinking it over afterward, to recall anything that could have served as a cue for so far-fetched a supposition as that. It could have sprung from nothing more palpable than the contrast suggested between Paula, the compeller, the _dompteuse_, and the man who had just been so describing her. He was so very thin; he was, if one looked closely, rather shabby, and beyond that, it had struck her that a haggard air there was about him was the product of an advanced stage of fatigue,--or hunger. But that of course, was absurd. Anyhow, not even the sound of her question startled her. Nor did it him. There was something apologetic about his smile. "It _is_ a reprieve," he admitted. "I left her a week ago," he went on to explain,--"it must have been the day Doctor Wollaston fell ill--on a promise not to come back until I had got this opera of mine into the shape she wants. I came back to-day to tell her that it can't be done--not by me. I have tried my utmost and it isn't enough. I haven't improved it even from her point of view let alone from mine. She isn't an easy person to come to with a confession of failure." "She's spoiling it," Mary said. "Why do you let her?" But March dissented from that. "If we agree that the thing's an opera--and of course that's what it is if it's anything--then what she wants it made over into is better than what I wrote. She's trying to put the Puccini throb into it. She's trying to make better drama out of it. LaChaise agrees with her. He said at the beginning that I relied too much on the orchestra and didn't give the singers enough to do. And, of course, it's easy to see that what a woman like Paula said or did would be more important to an audience than anything that an oboe could possibly say. When I'm with her, she--galvanizes me into a sort of belief that I can accomplish the thing she wants, but when I go off alone and try to do it...." He blinked and shook his head. "It has been a first-class nightmare, for a fact, this last week." But Mary demanded again. "Why do you let her?"