"Why, Pollard...." John Wollaston began but then he stopped short and
listened. "I thought I heard Paula coming," he explained.

"Paula won't be down for hours," Miss Wollaston said, "but I do not
see why she shouldn't hear, since she is a married woman and your
own wife...."

Her brother's "Precisely" cut across that sentence with a snick like a
pair of shears and left a little silence behind it.

"I think she'll be along in a minute," he went on. "She always does come
to breakfast. Why did you think she wouldn't to-day?"

This was one of Miss Wollaston's minor crosses. The fact was that on the
comparatively rare occasions when Doctor John himself was present for the
family breakfast at the custom-consecrated hour, Paula managed about two
times in five to put in a last-minute appearance. This was not what
annoyed Miss Wollaston. She was broad-minded enough to be aware that to
an opera singer, the marshaling of one's whole family in the dining-room
at eight o'clock in the morning might seem a barbarous and revolting
practise and even occasional submissions to it, acts of real devotion.
She was not really bitterly annoyed either by Paula's oft repeated
assertion that she always came to breakfast. Paula was one of those
temperamental persons who have to be forgiven for treating their
facts--atmospherically. But that John, a man of science, enlisted under
the banner of truth, should back this assertion of his wife's, in the
face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, really required
resignation to put up with; argued a blindness, an infatuation, which
seemed to his sister hardly decent. Because after all, facts were facts,
and you didn't alter them by pretending that they did not exist.