Here was where Paula's difficulties began. Because when they asked her
who he was, where he lived, where he came from, what his experiences in
the army had been, and whether he had been to France or not, she had to
profess herself upon all these topics totally uninformed. His name she
happened to know; it was Anthony March. He told her that, somehow,
right at the beginning, though she couldn't remember how the fact had
cropped out.

As to the other matters her husband and his sister were seeking
information about she simply hadn't had time to get around to things like
that. She thought he might have been a farmer once or some such sort of
person. He liked the country anyway. He had spent a lot of time, he told
her, tramping about in Illinois and Iowa, earning his way by tuning
farmers' pianos.

He hated Puccini and spoke rather disrespectfully of Wagner as a
spell-binder. He liked Wolf-Ferrari pretty well; the modern he was really
crazy about was Montemezzi. But he had made her sing oceans of
Gluck,--both the _Iphigenia_ and _Euridice_. It was awfully funny too
because he would sing the other parts wherever they happened to lie,
tenor, bass, contralto, anything, in the most awful voice you ever heard,
though his speaking voice was lovely. Let John just wait until he heard
it. It was almost as nice as his own. Oh, he was coming back again some
time. He had promised to bring over some songs of his own composing for
her to try.

It was at this point or thereabouts that John precipitated a crisis by
asking how much this paragon of a piano tuner had charged her for his
professional services. Paula stared at him, stricken.