as she had meant he should.

She told him during their drive what the source of her illumination was;
described Anthony March's visit on that most desperate day of all, the
vividness of his concern over the outcome of the fight and his utter
unconcern about the effect of it upon his own fortunes. She had been
reading Kipling aloud, out at the farm, to the boys and Aunt Lucile and a
memory of it led her to make a comparison--heedless of its
absurdity--between the composer and Kirn's lama. "He isn't, anyhow, tied
to the 'wheel of things' any more than that old man was."

"I'd like to have come down that day and heard him talk," John said.
"Because it's the real thing, with him. Not words. He wouldn't be a bad
person to go to," he added musingly, "if one had got himself into a
real _impasse_--or what looked like one. Paula has chucked his opera,
you know."

She nodded, evidently not in the least surprised and, no more, perturbed
by this intelligence. "He won't mind that," she explained. "The only
thing he really needs, in the world, is to hear his music, but this, you
see, wasn't his any more. He had been trying to make it Paula's. He had
been working over it rather hopelessly, because he had promised, but it
was like letting him out of school when he found that she had forgotten
all about him;--didn't care if she never saw him again."

She caught, without an explanatory word, the meaning of the glance her
father turned upon her, and went straight on. "Oh, it seems a lot, I
know, to have found out about him in one short talk, but there's
nothing--personal in that. He doesn't, I mean--save himself up for
special people. He's there for anybody. Like a public drinking fountain,
you know. That's why he would be such a wonderful person--to go to, as
you said. No one could possibly monopolize him."

She added, after a silence, "It seems a shame, when he wants so little
that he can't have that. Can't hear, for example, that opera of his the
way he really wrote it."

"We owe him something," her father said thoughtfully. "He got rather
rough justice from Paula, anyhow. I suppose a thing like that could,
perhaps, be managed--if one put his back into it."

She understood instantly, as before, and quite without exegesis, the
twinge of pain that went across his face. "You _will_ have a back to
put into things again, one of these days. It wants only courage to wait
for it, quite patiently until it comes. You've plenty of that. Th