Suppose you saw a little child about to take hold of the red-hot end of a poker?"

"A child is different," he opposed her. "All grown-ups are responsible for all children. I suppose I'd keep him from taking hold of it. And yet I'm not dead sure I'd be right. If I thought he was only just going to touch it, to see if it really would burn him as people had told him, I guess I'd let him."

"You always get around things," she said blamingly, "but there _are_ cases when you could be sure. Suppose you saw Aunt Hetty just about to take poison, or Frank Warner getting Nelly Powers to run away with him?"

He was startled by this, and asked quickly with a change of tone, "Whatever made you think of that? Are Frank and Nelly ... ?"

"Oh, it just came into my head. No, I haven't heard anybody has said anything, noticed anything. But I had a sort of notion that 'Gene doesn't like Frank hanging around the house so much."

"Well ..." commented her husband, with a lively accent of surprise. "I hadn't dreamed of such a thing. And it throws a light on something I happened to see this afternoon, on my way home. I came round the back way, the ravine road below the Eagle Rocks. I wanted to see about some popple we're thinking of buying from the Warners, on the shoulder beyond the Rocks. It didn't occur to me, of course, that anybody else would be up there, but just at the peak of the shoulder I saw 'Gene Powers, lying down beside a big beech-tree. He didn't hear me, walking on the pine-needles. And for a minute I stood there, and honestly didn't know what to do."

"How do you mean ... 'lying down'?" asked Marise, not visualizing the scene. "As though he were sick?"

"No, not a bit that way. Not on his back, but on his face, looking over the edge of the ridge. All strung up like a bow, his head down between his shoulders and shot forwards like a cat stalking something. _I_ tell you, he made me think of a hunter when he thinks he sees a deer. I thought probably he had. I've seen a buck and some does up there lately.

Then he saw me and jumped up very quickly and came down past me. I was going to say, just for the sake of saying something, 'Laying your plans for next deer-week?' But as he went by and nodded, he looked at me with such an odd expression that I thought I'd better not. The idea came to me that maybe 'Gene does poach and occasionally take a deer out of season. Meat is so high it wouldn't be surprising. They have a pretty hard time sc.r.a.ping along. I don't know as I'd blame him if he did shoot a deer once in a while.

"Well, after I'd been on beyond and made my estimate on the popple, I came back that way. And as I pa.s.sed where he'd been lying, I thought, just for curiosity, I'd go up and see if I could see what he'd been looking at so hard. I got up to the big beech where he'd been, and looked over. And I got the surprise of my life. He couldn't have been looking at deer, for on the other side the cliff drops down sheer, and you look right off into air, across the valley. I was so surprised I stood there, taken aback. The afternoon train went up the valley while I stood there, staring. It looked so tiny. You're really very high on those Rocks. I noticed you could see your Cousin Hetty's house from there, and the mill and the Powers house. That looked like a child's plaything, so little, under the big pine. And just as I looked at that, I saw a man come out from the house, get on a horse, and ride away."

"Why, that must have been Frank," said Marise. "He rides that roan mare of his as much as he drives her."

"Yes, that's what came into my mind when you spoke his name just now in connection with Nelly. I hadn't thought anything of it, before."

There was a moment's silence as they looked at each other.

"Oh, _Neale_!" said Marise, on a deep note. "How awful! You don't suppose there is anything in his jealousy... . Nelly is as inscrutable in her way as 'Gene."

"Heavens! how should I know? But my guess is that 'Gene is making a fool of himself for nothing. Nelly doesn't strike me as being the sort of woman to ..."

"But Frank is awfully good-looking and dashing, and lots younger than 'Gene. And Nelly is young too and perfectly stunning to look at. And she's not one of our native valley girls, you know. It may seem very dull and cooped-up here, so far from town, and shops. She may envy her sisters, still living back in West Adams with city life around them."

"Oh, it's possible enough, I suppose," admitted Neale. "But she seems perfectly contented, and thinks the world of the children."

Marise's face clouded. The phrase had recalled her dark preoccupations of a moment ago. "Lots of people nowadays would say she seems to be fond of the children because she is using them to fill up a lack in her life," she said somberly; "that 'Gene no longer satisfied her, and that she fed on the children because she was starving emotionally." Her husband making no comment on this, she went on, "Neale, don't you think that people are saying horrid, distressing things nowadays? About marriage I mean, and all relations between men and women and between parents and children?" Her heart was beating faster as she finished this question. The subject was broached at last. Where would it lead them?

Where would it lead them? She shut her eyes at the thought.

"There's a good deal to be said about all that, that's pretty horrid and perfectly true," remarked Neale casually. He tilted his hat further over his eyes and leaned back, propping himself on one elbow.

"_Neale_!" she protested, shocked and repelled. She had hoped for something very different from Neale. But she thought, in a momentary exasperation with him, she might have known she would not get it. He always took everything so abstractedly, so impersonally.

"I don't see any use in pretending there's not," he advanced with a reasonable, considering air. "I don't see that intimate human relationships are in any _more_ of a mess than other human relations.

International ones, for instance, just now. But they certainly are in considerable of a mess, in a great many cases. It is evident that lots of times they're managed all wrong."

Marise was so acutely disappointed that she felt a quavering ache in her throat, and kept silence for a moment. So this was what she had looked forward to, as a help. What was Neale there _for_, if not for her to lean against, to protect her, to be a defending wall about her? He was so strong and so clearheaded, he could be such a wall if he chose. How stern and hard he was, the core of him!

"Neale," she said after a moment, "I wonder if you even _know_ what things are being said about what we've always believed in ... motherhood for instance, and marriage?"

She had been unable to keep the quaver out of her voice, and at the sound of it, he sat up instantly, astonished, solicitous, tender. "Why, darling, what's the matter?" he said again, moving closer to her, bending over her.

"How _can_ you think such things without their making you perfectly miserable, without making you want to go straight and cut your throat?"

she cried out on his callousness.

He put his arm about her again, not absently this time, and drew her close. She thought angrily, "He thinks it's just a fit of nerves I can be soothed out of like a child," and pulled away from him.

He looked at her, his attentive, intelligent look, and let his arm drop.

And yet, although he was serious now, she was sure that he saw only that the subject agitated her, and did not see any possibility that it might touch them both, personally.

"I have to think whatever I'm convinced is true, whether it makes me miserable or not, don't I?" he said gently. "And it does make me miserable, of course. Who can help being miserable at the spectacle of such rich possibilities as human life is full of, mismanaged and spoiled and lost?"

"But, Neale, do you realize that people are thinking, books are being written to prove that parents' love for their children is only self-love, hypocritically disguised, and sometimes even s.e.xual love camouflaged; and that anybody is better for the children to be with than their mother; and that married people, after the first flare-up of pa.s.sion is over, hate each other instead of loving?"

"I daresay there's a certain amount of truth in that, occasionally. It would certainly explain some of the inexplicable things we all see happen in family life," he remarked.

Marise started and cried out piercingly, "Neale, how can you say such things to _me_!"

He looked at her keenly again, keenly and penetratingly, and said, "I'm not one of those who think it inherent in the nature of women to take abstract propositions personally always. But I do think they will have to make a big effort to get themselves out of a mighty old acquired habit of thinking every general observation is directed at them personally."

She flashed out indignantly at him, "How can you help taking it personally when it shakes the very foundations of our life?"

He was astonished enough at this to suit even her. His face showed the most genuine amazed incapacity to understand her. "Shakes the ... why, Marise dear, what are you talking about? You don't have to believe about _yourself_ all the generalizing guesses that people are writing down in books, do you, if it contradicts your own experience? Just because you read that lots of American men had flat-foot and were refused at the recruiting station for that, you don't have to think your own feet flat, do you? If you do think so, all you have to do is to start out and walk on them, to know for sure they're all right. Heavens and earth! People of our age, who have really lived, don't need somebody in a book to tell them what's happening to them. Don't you _know_ whether you really love Elly and Mark and Paul? If you don't, I should think a few minutes'

thought and recollection of the last ten years would tell you, all right. Don't you _know_ whether we hate each other, you and I?"

Marise drew a long breath of relief. This was the sort of talk she wanted. She clutched at the strong hand which seemed at last held out to her. She did so want to be talked out of it all. "Oh good! then, Neale, you don't believe any of that sort of talk? You were only saying so for argument."

He withdrew the hand. "Yes, I do believe a good deal of as a general proposition. What I'm saying, what I'm always saying, dear, and trying my best to live, is that everybody must decide for himself when a general proposition applies to him, what to believe about his own life and its values. n.o.body else can tell him."

She approached along another line. "But, Neale, that's all very well for you, because you have so much withstandingness in you. But for me, there are things so sacred, so intimate, so much a part of me, that only to have some rough hand laid on them, to have them pulled out and pawed over and thought about ... it frightens me so, sets me in such a quiver!

And they don't seem the same again. _Aren't_ there things in life so high and delicate that they can't stand questioning?"

He considered this a long time, visibly putting all his intelligence on it. "I can't say, for you," he finally brought out. "You're so much finer and more sensitive than I. But I've never in all these years seen that your fineness and your sensitiveness make you any less strong in the last a.n.a.lysis. You suffer more, respond more to all the implications of things; but I don't see that there is any reason to think there's any inherent weakness in you that need make you afraid to look at facts."

He presented this testimony to her, seriously, gravely. It took her breath, coming from him. She could only look at him in speechless grat.i.tude and swallow hard. Finally she said, falteringly, "You're too good, Neale, to say that. I don't deserve it. I'm awfully weak, many times."

"I wouldn't say it, if it weren't so," he answered, "and I didn't say you weren't weak sometimes. I said you were strong when all was said and done."

Even in her emotion, she had an instant's inward smile at the Neale-like quality of this. She went on, "But don't you think there is such a thing as spoiling beautiful elements in life, with handling them, questioning them, for natures that aren't naturally belligerent and ready to fight for what they want to keep? For instance, when somebody says that children in a marriage are like drift-wood left high on the rocks of a dwindled stream, tokens of a flood-time of pa.s.sion now gone by... ." She did not tell him who had said this. Nor did he ask. But she thought by his expression that he knew it had been Vincent Marsh.

He said heartily, "I should just call that a nasty-minded remark from somebody who didn't know what he was talking about. And let it go at that."

"There, you see," she told him, "that rouses your instinct to resist, to fight back. But it doesn't mine. It just makes me sick."

"Marise, I'm afraid that you _have_ to fight for what you want to keep in this world. I don't see any way out of it. And I don't believe that anybody else can do your fighting for you. You ask if it's not possible to have beautiful, intimate things spoiled by questioning, criticisms, doubts. Yes, I do think it is, for young people, who haven't learned anything of life at first hand. I think they ought to be protected till they have been able to acc.u.mulate some actual experience of life. That's the only weapon for self-defense anybody can have, what he has learned of life, himself. Young people are apt to believe what older people tell them about life, because they don't know anything about it, yet, themselves, and I think you ought to be careful what is questioned in their presence. But I don't see that mature people ought to be protected unless you want to keep them childish, as women used to be kept. Nothing is your own, if you haven't made it so, and kept it so."

"But, Neale, it's so sickeningly _hard_! Why do it? Why, when everything seems all right, pry into the deep and hidden roots of things? I don't _want_ to think about the possibility of some dreadful dry-rot happening to married people's feelings towards each other, as they get older and get used to each other. It's soiling to my imagination. What's the use?"

She had so hoped he would help her to sweep them all back to the cellar labeled "morbid" and lock them down in the dark again. Any other man would, she thought, amazed at him, _any_ other husband! She focussed all her personality pa.s.sionately to force him to answer as she wished.

He fell into another thoughtful silence, glanced up at her once sharply and looked down again. She always felt afraid of him when he looked like that. No, not afraid of him, but of the relentless thing he was going to say. Presently he said it. "What's the use? Why, the very fact you seem afraid of it ... I can't imagine why ... shows there would be some use.

To turn your back on anything you're afraid of, that's fatal, always. It springs on you from behind."