That habit held her mercilessly to see what was there now. She could no more look at what was there and think it something else, than she could look with her physical eyes at a tree and call it a dragon.

If it had only been traditional morality, reproaching her with traditional complaints about the overstepping of traditional bounds, how she could have overwhelmed it, drowned out its feeble old voice, with eloquent appeals for the right to growth, to freedom, to the generous expansion of the soul, of the personality, which Vincent Marsh could give. But honesty only asked her neutrally, "Is it really growth and freedom, and generous expansion of the soul?" Poor Marise felt her arms fall to her side, piteous and defenseless. No, it was not.

It was with the flatness of accent which she hated, which was so hard for her, that she made the admission. It was physical excitement,--that was what it was. Physical excitement, that was what Vincent Marsh could give her which Neale no longer could... . That and great ease of life, which Neale never would. There was a pause in which she shivered, humiliated. She added lamely to this, a guessed-at possibility for aesthetic sympathy and understanding, perhaps more than Neale could ...

and broke off with a qualm of sickness. How horrid this was! How it offended a deep sense of personal dignity and decency! How infinitely more beautiful and gracious those rolling clouds of vagueness and impulsive illusion!

But at least, when it had extracted the plain, bare statement which it had hunted down through the many-recessed corners of her heart, that stern sense of reality let her alone. She no longer felt like a beetle impaled on a pin. She was free now to move as she liked and look unmolested at what she pleased. Honesty had no more power over her than to make sure she saw what she was pretending to look at.

But at what a diminished pile she had now to look, tarnished and faded like the once-loved bits of bright-colored silk and paper. She felt robbed and cried out in a pain which seemed to her to come from her very heart, that something living and vital and precious to her had been killed by that rough handling. But one warning look from the clear eyes of honesty forced her, lamenting, to give up even this. If it had been living and precious and vital to her, it would have survived anything that honesty could have done to it.

But something had survived, something to be reckoned with, something which no tyrant, overbearing honesty could put out of her life ... the possibility for being carried away in the deep full current of pa.s.sion, fed by all the mult.i.tudinous streams of ripened personality. If that was all that was left, was not that enough? It had been for thousands of other women... .

No, not that; honesty woke to menace again. What thousands of other women had done had no bearing here. She was not thousands of other women. She was herself, herself. Would it be enough for her?

Honesty issued a decree of impartial justice. Let her look at it with a mature woman's experienced divination of reality, let her look at it as it would be and see for herself if it would be enough. She was no girl whose ignorance rendered her incapable of judging until she had literally experienced. She was no bound-woman, bullied by the tyranny of an outgrown past, forced to revolt in order to attain the freedom without which no human decision can be taken. Neale's strong hand had opened the door to freedom and she could see what the bound-women could not ... that freedom is not the end, but only the beginning.

It was as though something were holding her gripped and upright there, staring before her, motionless, till she had put herself to the last supreme test. She closed her eyes, and sat so immobile, rapt in the prodigious effort of her imagination and will, that she barely breathed.

How would it be? Would it be enough? She plunged the plummet down, past the fury and rage of the storm on the surface, past the teeming life of the senses, down to the depths of consciousness... .

And what she brought up from those depths was a warning distaste, a something offending to her, to all of her, now she was aware of it.

She was amazed. Why should she taste an acrid muddy flavor of dregs in that offered cup of heavy aromatic wine, she who had all her life thanked Heaven for her freedom from the ignominy of feeling it debasing to be a woman who loved? It was glorious to be a woman who loved. There had been no dregs left from those sweet, light, heady draughts she and Neale had drunk together in their youth, nor in the quieter satisfying draughts they knew now. What was the meaning of that odor of decay about what seemed so living, so hotly more living than what she had? Why should she have this unmistakable prescience of something stale and tainting which she had never felt? Was she too old for pa.s.sion? But she was in the height of her physical flowering, and physically she cried out for it. Could it be that, having spent the heritage of youth, she could not have it again? Could it be that one could not go back, there, any more than ...

Oh, what did that bring to mind? What was that fleeting cobweb of thought that seemed a recurrence of a sensation only recently pa.s.sed?

When she had tried to tell herself that full-fruited pa.s.sion was worth all else in life, was the one great and real thing worth all the many small shams ... what was it she had felt?

She groped among the loose-hanging filaments of impression and brought it out to see. It seemed to be ... could it have been, the same startled recoil as at the notion of getting back the peace of childhood by giving up her home for the toy-house; her living children for the dolls?

Now, for the great trial of strength. Back! Push back all those thick-cl.u.s.tering, intruding, distracting traditional ideas of other people on both sides; the revolt on one hand, the feeble resignation on the other; what other women did; what people had said... . Let her wipe all that off from the too-receptive tablets of her mind. Out of sight with all that. This was _her_ life, _her_ question, hers alone. Let her stand alone with her own self and her own life, and, with honesty as witness, ask herself the question ... would she, if she could, give up what she was now, with her myriads of roots, deep-set in the soil of human life, in order to bear the one red rose, splendid though it might be?

That was the question.

With no conscious volition of hers, the answer was there, plain and irrefutable as a fact in the physical world. No, she would not choose to do that. She had gone on, gone on beyond that. She was almost bewildered by the peremptory certainty with which that answer came, as though it had lain inherent in the very question.

And now another question crowded forward, darkly confused, charged with a thousand complex a.s.sociations and emotions. There had been something displeasing and preposterous in the idea of trying to stoop her grown stature and simplify her complex tastes and adult interests back into the narrow limits of a child's toy-house. Could it be that she felt something of the same displeasure when she set herself fully to conceive what it would be to cramp herself and her complex interests and adult affections back to ...

But at this there came a wild protesting clamor, bursting out to prevent her from completing this thought; loud, urgent voices, men's, women's, with that desperate certainty of their ground which always struck down any guard Marise had been able to put up. They cried her down as a traitor to the fullness of life, those voices, shouting her down with all the unquestioned authority she had encountered so many times on that terribly vital thing, the printed page; they clashed in their fury and all but drowned each other out. Only disconnected words reached her, but she recognized the well-known sentences from which they came ...

"puritanism ... abundance of personality ... freedom of development ... nothing else vital in human existence ...

prudishness ... conventionality ... our only possible contact with the life-purpose ... with the end of pa.s.sion life declines and dies."

The first onslaught took Marise's breath, as though a literal storm had burst around her. She was shaken as she had been shaken so many times before. She lost her hold on her staff ... _what had that staff been?_

At the thought, the master-words came to her mind again; and all fell quiet and in a great hush waited on her advance. Neale had said, "What is deepest and most living in _you_." Well, what _was_ deepest and most living in her? That was what she was trying to find out. That was what those voices were trying to cry her down from finding.

For the first time in all her life, she drew an inspiration from Neale's resistance to opposition, knew something of the joy of battle. What right had those people to cry her down? She would not submit to it.

She would go back to the place where she had been set upon by other people's voices, other people's thoughts, and she would go on steadily, thinking her own.

She had been thinking that there _was_ the same displeasure and distaste as when she had thought of returning to her literal childhood, when she set herself fully to conceive what it would be to cramp herself and simplify her complex interests and affections back to the narrow limits of pa.s.sion, which like her play with dolls had been only a foreshadowing of something greater to come.

She spoke it out boldly now, and was amazed that not one of the clamorous voices dared resist the authenticity of her statement. But after all, how would they dare? This was what she had found in her own heart, what they had not been able, for all their clamor, to prevent her from seeing. She had been strong enough to beat them, to stand out against them, to say that she saw what she really did see, and felt what she really did feel. She did not feel what traditionally she should feel, that is what a primitive Italian woman might feel, all of whose emotional life had found no other outlet than s.e.x... .

Well, if it was so, it was so. For better or for worse, that was the kind of woman she had become, with the simple, forthright physical life subordinate, humble; like a pleasant, lovable child playing among the strong, full-grown, thought-freighted interests and richly varied sympathies and half-impersonal joys and sorrows which had taken possession of her days. And she could not think that the child could ever again be master of her destiny, any more than (save in a moment of false sentimentality) she could think that she would like to have her horizon again limited by a doll-house. To be herself was to go on, not to go back, now that she knew what she had become. It seemed to her that never before had she stood straight up.

And in plain fact she found that somehow she had risen to her feet and was now standing, her head up, almost touching the rafters of the slant ceiling. She could have laughed out, to find herself so free. She knew now why she had never known the joy of battle. It was because she had been afraid. And she had been afraid because she had never dared to enter the battle, had always sent others in to do her fighting for her.

Now she had been forced into it and had won. And there was nothing to be afraid of, there!

She spread out her arms in a great gesture of liberation. How had she ever lived before, under the shadow of that coward fear? This ... this ... she had a moment of vision ... this was what Neale had been trying to do for her, all these years, unconsciously, not able to tell her what it was, driving at the mark only with the inarticulate wisdom of his love for her, his divination of her need. He had seen her, shivering and shrinking in the shallow waters, and had longed for her sake to have her strike out boldly into the deep. But even if he had been ever so able to tell her, she would not have understood till she had fought her way through those ravening breakers, beyond them, out into the sustaining ocean.

How long it took, how _long_ for men and women to make the smallest advance! And how the free were the only ones who could help to liberate the bound. How she had fought against Neale's effort to set her free, had cried to him that she dared not risk herself on the depths, that he must have the strength to swim for her ... and how Neale, doggedly sure of the simple truth, too simple for her to see, had held to the certainty that his effort would not make her strong, and that she would only be free if she were strong.

Neale being his own master, a free citizen of life, knew what a kingdom he owned, and with a magnanimity unparalleled could not rest till she had entered hers. She, not divining what she had not known, had only wished to make the use of his strength which would have weakened her.

Had there ever before been any man who refused to let the woman he loved weaken herself by the use of his strength? Had a man ever before held out his strong hand to a woman to help her forward, not to hold her fast?

Her life was her own. She stood in it, knowing it to be an impregnable fortress, knowing that from it she could now look abroad fearlessly and understandingly, knowing that from it she could look at things and men and the world and see what was there. From it she could, as if for the first time, look at Vincent Marsh when next she saw him; she would look to see what was really there. That was all. She would look at him and see what he was, and then she would know the meaning of what had happened, and what she was to do. And no power on earth could prevent her from doing it. The inner bar that had shut her in was broken. She was a free woman, free from that something in her heart that was afraid.

For the moment she could think of nothing else beyond the richness of that freedom. Why, here was the total fulfilment she had longed for.

Here was the life more abundant, within, within her own heart, waiting for her!

The old clock in the hall behind her sounded four m.u.f.fled strokes and, as if it had wakened her, Agnes stirred in her bed and cried out in a loud voice of terror, "Oh, come quick, Miss Marise! Come!"

Marise went through the hail and to her door, and saw the frightened old eyes glaring over the pulled-up sheet. "Oh ... oh ... it's you ... I thought... . Oh, Miss Marise, don't you see anything standing in that corner? Didn't you hear... . Oh, Miss Marise, I must have had a bad dream. I thought ..." Her teeth were chattering. She did not know what she was saying.

"It's all right, Agnes," said Marise soothingly, stepping into the room.

"The big clock just struck four. That probably wakened you."

She sat down on the bed and laid her hand firmly on Agnes' shoulder, looking into the startled old eyes, which grew a little quieter now that someone else was there. What a pitiable creature Agnes' dependence on Cousin Hetty had made of her.

Like the boom from a great bell came the thought, "That is what I wanted Neale to make of me, when the crucial moment came, a dependent ... but he would not."

"What time did you say it is?" Agnes asked, still breathing quickly but with a beginning of a return to her normal voice.

"Four o'clock," answered Marise gently, as to a child. "It must be almost light outside. The last night when you have anything to fear is over now."

She went to the window and opened the shutter. The ineffable sacred pureness of another dawn came in, gray, tranquil, penetrating.

At the sight of it, the dear light of everyday, Marise felt the thankful tears come to her eyes.

"See, Agnes," she said in an unsteady voice, "daylight has come. You can look around for yourself, and see that there is nothing to be afraid of."

CHAPTER XXVI