She rushed home to practise scales diligently, remembering with every thump of the keys that she was never to marry—tum-tum-tum, and that Bliss Hobart was a visionary dreamer—tum-tum, art never could be placed on a moral, idealistic basis, never—ti-ti, she had no idea of trying to be one of the vanguard because how useless it would be when one was tied to a ghost lady—tum-tum-ti, that wretched bohemian of a Polly had unsettled her—ti-ti-ti, anyway, Bliss had said he would not consider a vow to a ghost lady as binding—tra-la-la, yet after confiding his great secret, why did he rush off without a good-by, expecting her to do what? Why didn’t he go scold Ernestine or Caleb or Collin, some one besides herself—ta-ta-tum, she finished with a final thump and a superbly clear note which brought Miss Clergy to the door to applaud. For the first time Thurley turned from her in recoil. She seemed a jailer preventing Polly’s vision from coming true—and what a lovely vision it had been!... “Thurley, are you ill?” Miss Clergy was asking. “I’m tired of everything,” she answered, without controlling her temper, “of singing and New York and myself—and you,” like a walli-walli windstorm she swept out of the room, remaining alone until she could laugh off her outburst by a light, humorous explanation of a tight slipper or the alarming story told by the weekly weight on undeniably uniform scales! When Hobart did return, he was a tired and not easily enlivened man whose summer had been spent overseas planning things calculated to counteract the effects of “military poison ivy,” so he said enigmatically. He met Thurley with seemingly weary interest and a disapproving shake of the head when she tried again to convince him that her way and Lissa’s way was the best—as well as the easiest—and the chewing-gum king only one of a handful of “pet robins!” Then he looked at her in her sophisticated maze of gold cloth and gave a boyish laugh. “If you told me you were totally depraved, I should only laugh,” he said. “You are trying to fool yourself into thinking yourself a first water adventuress, so how can you expect to fool me? Come, come, what terrific things have you allowed to happen to your voice! We shall have to send you to the nursery to begin again! So Lissa coached you! I knew the voice assassin’s marks of violence.” He busied himself with getting Thurley’s voice in shape for her opening night. They did not talk again of the vision or Thurley’s snap judgment regarding life. Once Thurley ventured to say he looked tired and he answered that when a man is used to really ‘living’ for three months of the year, to be shunted into another channel tells on his disposition, but he would weather it all right and he was very glad to have been of service.