“Who wouldn’t—living with a ghost person and working harder than an engineer? Bliss will find her a coach this fall who will treat her mercilessly and make her grind again. It isn’t that any singing teacher can teach Thurley things; they merely shut her up in figurative fashion in a dark closet until she promises to behave and sing the way in which she knows she should.” “She went it rapidly for a time,” Collin reflected, languidly applauding the antics of a folk dance done by “lanky hanks of shes”—“do look behind to see if Hortense Quinby is listening. I’ve an idea she sells her eavesdropping per word to Caleb ... ever notice how she plays ferret when two or three are gathered together talking in an undertone?” “She’s in pursuit of the professor of ethnology that Mrs. Barnhardt has in tow; he’s a widower on the loose,” Polly chuckled. “All power to her—what’s on for your summer?” “Work, I presume.” Polly’s face lost its gaiety. Drudging through a winter of failure with Bliss Hobart telling her she was naught but wilful in refusing to accept the inevitable and also a position—salt in the wound—of assistant librarian for the opera house—it was sufficient to bring about the change of expression. “What is ahead for you?” “No work, I refuse all commissions, the Allied generals might beg in vain. I’m going to play; there’s a lot of us who are going to visit Bliss at his hermitage.” “What luck! Really invade his sacred portals?” “Well, we call it play. I’m to go and the Russian who writes and that funny little man with the square head, Tyronne—he does those historical essays no one reads but every one looks at underneath a glass case in a hundred years or so. And Caleb and Bliss had a row about Caleb’s not writing as he should and Caleb isn’t coming. Poor old Sam is in Lunnon recruiting and he is out, too. But we are going to try to loaf away the summer. I’ll put a sign on my gate, Shoo flies, don’t bother me, I’ve gone off to the north countree—” He was selfishly unconscious of Polly’s expression. “How splendid!” was all she said. “I wish I were a boy. I’d go along as Oolong Formosa, the only valet who did not anger the master by gaining a university diploma just when I had become proficient in whisk brooming!”