"You can't tune a piano like this."--He pushed up the cover and stared
gloomily at the strings. "A mincing sickly thing like this. It's all
wrong. The scale is all wrong. The man who designed it ought to be hung.
But he called it a piano and sold it for a piano and I'm expected to come
in and tune it. Slick and smear it over and leave it sounding sicklier
and tubbier and more generally disgusting than ever. You might as well
take a painted harlot off the streets"--he glared at the ornate
extravagance of the case--"and expect to make a gentlewoman of her with
one lesson in deportment. I won't tune it. It's better left as it is. In
its shame."

"Well," said Paula, letting go a long breath, "you've said it."

Then she dropped into a chair and began to laugh. Never again, she felt
sure, would the drawing-room piano be able to cause her a moment's
irritation. This astonishing piano tuner of Lucile's had converted it,
with his new christening, into a source of innocent merriment. "The
painted harlot" covered the ground. Clear inspiration was what that was.
The way he went on glowering at it, digging every now and then a new and
more abominable chord out of its entrails made her mirth the more
uncontrollable.

"It isn't funny, you know, a thing like this," he remonstrated at last.
"It's serious."

"It would be serious," she retorted with sudden severity, "if you had
said all that or anything in the least like that to Miss Wollaston.
Because she really loves it. She has adopted it."

"Was she the lady who spoke to me in the park?" His evident consternation