Thurley put up her hands in protest and dismissed him, sending Lissa a good-by present and evading a possible interview. It did not seem as if she could endure these vapid persons who were rushing over to gain fame, excitement, copy or a worth-while matrimonial alliance! She saw, in truth, the result of Bliss Hobart’s words, that were the foundation of art of sterner stuff regarding personalities, these cluttery amateurs and intriguers would be, perforce, engaged in some industry and not foot-loose to follow the procession. The really great souls whose work would ennoble the cause could go forth unquestioned and certain of results. The morning’s mail brought her consolation—a note from Collin, characteristically brief and with a pencil sketch of himself, very knock-kneed and bulging of eye, clad in uniform. Dear Thurley (he wrote) After all, women aren’t the only ones to change their minds. Don’t laff! Or I’ll cut you off without a helmet. I’ve traded my brush for a bayonet. It got me. That’s why—selah, Collin. “Good boy,” Thurley said as she finished reading the note to Miss Clergy, “and I suppose Polly will march in with the Long Island Legion of Death behind her, making war on me if I dare to smile.” “But you won’t have to stop singing, will you?” was all Miss Clergy answered. “There’ll be enough people left at home to listen to you?” “I won’t stop,” Thurley promised gently, adding to herself, “my singing is Miss Clergy’s form of an ooze!” She was wondering these days if, when she met Bliss Hobart again, the holiday at Blessed Memory would serve to bring them into closer understanding or if, as after so many other rare moments, there would follow a desultory friendship with the same harsh taskmaster and critic speaking no more of visions. Later in the day he did call on her, the same elegantly dressed Mr. Public Opinion who was so besieged with patriotic duties and enterprises and enmeshed in a mass of detail regarding the reconstruction of grand opera, law suits impudently presented by dismissed Teutonic songbirds, the revival of English and French music and the possibility of a new prodigy, that he seemed to Thurley to be twin brother to the man who had played and worked and thought in the fashion of a hundred years ago—in a hundred-years-ago setting. “Polly is busied with a surprise,” he told her, “a horrible war opera, I presume. No one seems able to convince her she is hopeless. And that ridiculous devil of a Collin has gone to fight, bless him, while Ernestine has fallen prey to war-madness which is besetting emotional and idle women and she will return with a new stock of morbidity—because she has tried to do something which she had no excuse for attempting.” “What of Mark, Lissa, Hortense?” she persisted, laughing.