He now went on, "But I'm glad to have gone. I saw a great deal else there than your eccentric plant and the vacancy of mind of those sons of toil, cursed, soul-destroying toil. For one thing, I saw a woman of very great beauty. And that is always so much gained."

"Oh yes," cried Marise, "that's so. I forgot that you could see that.

I've grown so used to the fact that people here don't understand how splendidly handsome Nelly Powers is. Their taste doesn't run to the statuesque, you know. They call that grand silent calm of her, stupidness! Ever since 'Gene brought her here as a bride, a year after we came to live in Crittenden's, I have gone out of my way to look at her. You should see her hanging out the clothes on a windy day. One sculptured ma.s.sive pose after another. But even to see her walk across the room and bend that shining head is thrilling."

"I saw something else, too," went on Marsh, a cool voice speaking out of the darkness. "I saw that her black, dour husband is furiously in love with her and furiously jealous of that tall, ruddy fellow with an expressive face, who stood by the door in shirt-sleeves and never took his eyes from her."

Marise was silent, startled by this shouting out of something she had preferred not to formulate.

"Vincent, you see too much," said Mr. Welles resignedly. The phrase ran from his tongue as though it were a familiar one.

Marise said slowly, "I've sometimes thought that Frank Warner did go to the Powers' a good deal, but I haven't wanted to think anything more."

"What possible reason in the world have you for not wanting to?" asked Marsh with the most authentic accent of vivid and astonished curiosity.

"What reason ... ?" she repeated blankly.

He said dispa.s.sionately, "I don't like to hear _you_ make such a flat, conventional, rubber-stamp comment. Why in the world shouldn't she love a fine, ardent, _living_ man, better than that knotty, dead branch of a husband? A beautiful woman and a living, strong, vital man, they belong together. Whom G.o.d hath joined ... Don't try to tell me that your judgment is maimed by the Chinese shoes of outworn ideas, such as the binding nature of a mediaeval ceremony. That doesn't marry anybody, and you know it. If she's really married to her husband, all right. But if she loves another man, and knows in her heart that she would live a thousand times more fully, more deeply with him ... why, she's _not_ married to her husband, and nothing can make her. You know that!"

Marise sprang at the chance to turn his own weapons of mockery against him. "Upon my word, who's idealizing the Yankee mountaineer now?" she cried, laughing out as she spoke at the idea of her literal-minded neighbors dressed up in those trailing rhetorical robes. "I thought you said they were so dull and insensitive they could feel nothing but an interest in two-headed calves, and here they are, characters in an Italian opera. I only wish Nelly Powers were capable of understanding those grand languages of yours and then know what she thought of your idea of what's in her mind. And as for 'Gene's jealousy, I'll swear that it amounts to no more than a vague dislike for Frank Warner's 'all the time hanging around and ga.s.sin' instead of stickin' to work.' And you forget, in your fine modern clean-sweep, a few old-fashioned facts like the existence of three Powers children, dependent on their mother."

"You're just fencing, not really talking," he answered imperturbably.

"You can't pretend to be sincere in trying to pull that antimaca.s.sar home-and-mother stuff on me. Ask Bernard Shaw, ask Freud, ask Mrs.

Gilman, how good it is for children's stronger, better selves, to live in the enervating, hot-house concentration on them of an unbalanced, undeveloped woman, who has let everything else in her personality atrophy except her morbid preoccupation with her own offspring. That's really the meaning of what's sentimentally called 'mothering.' Probably it would be the best thing in the world for the Powers children if their mother ran away with that fine broth of a lad."

"But Nelly loves her children and they love her!" Marise brought this out abruptly, impulsively, and felt, as she heard the words, that they had a flat, nave sound, out of key with the general color of this talk, like a C Major chord introduced into Debussy nuances.

"Not much she doesn't, nor they her. Any honest observer of life knows that the only sincere relation possible between the young and the old (after the babies are weaned) is hostility. We hated our elders, because they got in our way. And they'll hate us as soon as they get the strength to, because we'll be in their way. And we will hate them because they will want to push us off the scene. It's impossible to ignore the gulf. Most human tragedies come from trying to pretend it's not there."

"Why, Mr. Welles," cried Marise again, "what do you say to such talk?

Don't you find him perfectly preposterous?"

Mr. Welles answered a little absently. "Oh, I'm pretty well used to him, by now. And all his friends in the city are talking like that now. It's the fashion. I'm so old that I've seen a good many fashions in talk come and go. I never could see that people _acted_ any differently, no matter which way they talk." As he finished, he drew a long sigh, which had obviously no connection with what he had been saying. With the sigh, came an emanation from him of dispirited fatigue. Marise wished she dared draw his hand upon her arm and ask him to lean on her as they walked.

Nothing more was said for a time. Marise lost herself in the outdoor wideness of impression that always came to her under a night sky, where she felt infinity hovering near. She was aware of nothing but the faint voice of the pines, the distant diminuendo of the frog's song, the firm elastic quality of the ground under her feet, so different from the iron rigidity of the winter earth, and the cool soft pressure of the night-air on her cheeks, when, like something thrust into her mind from the outside, there rose into her consciousness, articulate and complete, the reason why she had shrunk from looking at the photograph of Rocca di Papa. It was because it was painful to her, intimately painful and humiliating to remember how she and Neale had felt there, the wild, high things they had said to each other, that astounding flood of feeling which had swept them away at the last. What had become of all that?

Where now was that high tide?

Of course she loved Neale, and he loved her; there was n.o.body like Neale, yes, all that; but oh! the living flood had been ebbing, ebbing out of their hearts. They were not _alive_ as they had been alive when they had clung to each other, there on that age-old rock, and felt the tide of all the ages lift them high.

It must have been ebbing for a long time before she realized it because, hurried, absorbed, surrounded incessantly by small cares as she was, hustled and jostled in her role of mother and mistress-of-the-house in servantless America, with the primitive American need to do so much with her own hands, she had not even had the time to know the stupid, tragic thing that was happening to her ... that she was turning into a slow, vegetating plant instead of a human being. And now she understood the meaning of the strange dejection she had felt the day when little Mark went off to school with the others. How curiously jaded and apprehensive she had felt that morning, and when she had gone downstairs to see the callers who arrived that day. That was the first time she had _felt_ that the tide was ebbing.

All this went through her mind with the cruel swiftness of a sword-flash. And the first reaction to it, involuntary and reflex, was to crush it instantly down, lest the man walking at her side should be aware of it. It had come to her with such loud precision that it seemed it must have been audible.

As she found herself still on the dark country road, cloaked and protected by the blackness of the starless night, she was struck with wonder, as though she had never thought of it before, at the human body, its opaque, inscrutable mystery, the locked, sealed strong-box of unimaginable secrets which it is. There they were, the three of them, stepping side by side, brushing each other as they moved; and as remote from each other as though they were on different stars. What were the thoughts, powerful, complex, under perfect control, which were being marshaled in that round, dark head? She felt a little afraid to think; and turned from the idea to the other man with relief. She knew (she told herself) as though she saw inside, the tired, gentle, simple, wistful thoughts that filled the white head on her other side.

With this, they were again at the house, where the children and Toucle had preceded them. Paul was laughing and saying, "Elly's the looniest kid! She's just been saying that Father is like ..." Elly, in a panic, sprang up at him, clapping her hand over his mouth, crying out, "No, Paul, you shan't tell! _Don't!_"

The older, stronger child pulled himself away and, holding her at arm's length, continued, "She said Father was like the end of her hair that's fastened into her head, and Mother was the end that flaps in the wind, and Mr. Marsh was like the Eagle Rock brook, swirly and hurrying the way it is in the spring."

Elly, half crying, came to her mother. "Mother, it's nasty-horrid in Paul to tell when I didn't want him to."

Marise began taking off the little girl's coat. "It wasn't very kind in Paul, but there was nothing in those funny little fancies to hide, dear."

"I didn't care about you and Father!" explained the child. "Only ..."

She looked at Mr. Marsh from under downbent brows.

"Why, Elly, I am very much complimented, I'm sure," Marsh hastened to tell her, "to be compared with such a remarkably nice thing as a brook in spring-time. I didn't suppose any young lady would ever have such a poetic idea about me."

"Oh ..." breathed Elly, relieved, "well ..."

"Do you suppose you little folks can get yourselves to bed without me?"

asked Marise. "If one of you big children will unb.u.t.ton Mark in the back, he can manage the rest. I must set a bread-sponge before I go upstairs."

They clung to her imploringly. "But you'll be upstairs in time to kiss us good-night in our beds," begged Elly and Mark together. Paul also visibly hung on his mother's answer.

Marise looked down into their clear eyes and eager faces, reaching out to her ardently, and she felt her heart melt. What darlings they were!

What inestimable treasures! How sweet to be loved like that!

She stooped over them and gathered them all into a great armful, kissing them indiscriminately. "Yes, of course, I will ... and give you an extra kiss now!" she cried.

She felt Marsh's eyes on her, sardonically.

She straightened herself, saying with affectionate roughness, "There, that's enough. Scamper along with you. And don't run around with bare feet!"

She thought to herself that she supposed this was the sort of thing Marsh meant when he spoke about hot-house enervating concentration. She had been more stung by that remark of his than she had been willing to acknowledge to Marsh or to herself.

But for the moment, any further reflection on it was cut short by the aspect of Mr. Welles' face. He had sunk into a chair near the lamp, with an att.i.tude and an expression of such weariness, that Marise moved quickly to him. "See here, Mr. Welles," she said impulsively, "you have something on your mind, and I've got the mother-habit so fastened on me that I can't be discreet and pretend not to notice it. I want to make you say what the trouble is, and then flu it right, just as I would for one of mine."

The old man looked up at her gratefully and reaching out one of his wrinkled hands took hers in it. "It does me good to have you so nice to me," he said, "but I'm afraid even you can't fix it right. I've had a rather distressing letter today, and I can't seem to get it out of my mind."

"Schwatzk.u.mmerer can't send the gladioli," conjectured Marsh.

For the first time since he had entered the house, Marise felt a pa.s.sing dislike for him. She had often felt him to be hard and ruthless, but she had never seen anything cheap in him, before, she thought.

"What was your letter?" she asked the older man.

"Oh, nothing in the least remarkable, nothing new," he said heavily.

"I've got a cousin whom I haven't seen since she was a little little girl, though she must be somewhere near my age, now. She has been a teacher in a school for Negroes, down in Georgia, for years, most of her life. But I had sort of lost track of her, till I had to send her some little family trinkets that were left after my old aunt died. Her letter, that I received today, is in answer to that. And while she was writing, she gave me her news, and told me a good deal about conditions down there. Pretty bad, I should think it, pretty bad."

A little spasm crossed his face. He shook his head, as though to shake off a clinging filament of importunate thought.

"What's the trouble? Do they need money, the school?" asked Marise with a vague idea of getting up a contribution.

"No, my cousin didn't say anything about that. It's not so simple. It's the way the Negroes are treated. No, not lynchings, I knew about them.

But I knew they don't happen every day. What I hadn't any idea of, till her letter came, was how every day, every minute of every day, they're subject to indignity that they can't avoid, how they're made to feel themselves outsiders and unwelcome in their own country. She says the Southern white people are willing to give them anything that will make good day-laborers of them, almost anything in fact except the thing they can't rise without, ordinary human respect. It made a very painful impression on my mind, her letter, very. She gave such instances. I haven't been able to get it out of my mind. For instance, one of the small things she told me ... it seems incredible ... is that Southern white people won't give the ordinary t.i.tle of respect of Mr. or Mrs. or Dr. even to a highly educated Negro. They call them by their first names, like servants. Think what an hourly pin-p.r.i.c.k of insult that must be. Ever since her letter came, I've been thinking about it, the things she told me, about what happens when they try to raise themselves and refine themselves, how they're made to suffer intimately for trying to be what I thought we all wanted all Americans to be." He looked at Marise with troubled eyes. "I've been thinking how it would feel to be a Negro myself. What a different life would be in front of your little Elly if she had Negro blood!"

Marise had listened to him in profound silence. Sheer, unmixed astonishment filled her mind, up to the brim. Of all the totally unexpected things for Mr. Welles to get wrought up about!