The Brimming Cup

IN AUNT HETTY'S GARDEN

Marise bent to kiss the soft withered cheek. "Elly is a real Vermonter, but I'm not. She can get along with just 'Hello, Aunt Hetty,' but that's not enough for me," she said tenderly to the old woman; "I have to kiss you."

"Oh, you can do as you like, for all of me," answered the other with an unsparing indifference.

Marise laughed at the quality of this, taking the shaky old hand in hers with a certainty of affection returned. She went on, "This is a regular descent on you, Cousin Hetty. I've come to show you off, you and the house and the garden. This is Mr. Welles who has settled next door to us, you know, and this is Mr. Marsh who is visiting him for a time. And here are the children, and Eugenia Mills came up from the city last night and will be here perhaps, if she gets up energy after her afternoon nap, and Neale is coming over from the mill after closing hours, and we've brought along a basket supper and, if you'll let us, we're going to eat it out in your garden, under Great-great-grandmother's willow-tree."

Cousin Hetty nodded dry, though not uncordial greetings to the strangers and said crisply, "You're welcome enough to sit around anywhere you can find, and eat your lunch here, but where you're going to find anything to show off, beats me."

"Mr. Welles is interested in gardens and wants to look at yours."

"Not much to look at," said the old lady uncompromisingly.

"I don't want to look at a garden!" clamored little Mark, outraged at the idea. "I want to be let go up to Aunt Hetty's yattic where the sword and 'pinning-wheel are."

"Would all you children like that best?" asked Marise.

Their old kinswoman answered for them, "You'd better believe they would. You always did yourself. Run along, now, children, and don't fall on the attic stairs and hurt yourselves on the wool-hetchels."

The fox-terrier, who had hung in an anguish of uncertainty and hope and fear on the incomprehensible words passing between little Mark and the grown-ups, perceiving now that the children ran clattering towards the stairs, took a few agitated steps after them, and ran back to Marise, shivering, begging with his eyes, in a wriggling terror lest he be forbidden to follow them into the fun. Marise motioned him along up the stairs, saying with a laughing, indulgent, amused accent, "Yes, yes, poor Médor, you can go along with the children if you want to."

The steel sinews of the dog's legs stretched taut on the instant, in a great bound of relief. He whirled with a ludicrous and undignified haste, slipping, his toe-nails clicking on the bare floor, tore across the room and dashed up the stairs, drunk with joy.

"If strong emotions are what one wants out of life," commented Marise lightly, to Marsh, "one ought to be born a nervous little dog, given over to the whimsical tyranny of humans."

"There are other ways of coming by strong emotions," answered Marsh, not lightly at all.

"What in the world are wool-hetchels?" asked Mr. Welles as the grown-ups went along the hall towards the side-door.

"Why, when I was a girl, and we spun our own wool yarn . . ." began Cousin Hetty, trotting beside him and turning her old face up to his.

Marsh stopped short in the hall-way with a challenging abruptness that brought Marise to a standstill also. The older people went on down the long dusky hail to the door and out into the garden, not noticing that the other two had stopped. The door swung shut behind them.

Marise felt the man's dark eyes on her, searching, determined. They were far from those first days, she thought, when he had tacitly agreed not to look at her like that, very far from those first days of delicacy and lightness of touch.

With a determination as firm as his own, she made her face and eyes opaque, and said on a resolutely gay note, "What's the matter? Can't you stand any more information about early times in Vermont? You must have been having too heavy a dose of Mr. Bayweather. But I like it, you know. I find it awfully interesting to know so in detail about any past period of human life; as much so . . . why not? . . . as researches into which provinces of France used half-timber houses, and how late?"

"You like a great many things!" he said impatiently.

"We must get out into the garden with the others, or Cousin Hetty will be telling her old-time stories before we arrive," she answered, moving towards the door.

She felt her pulse knocking loud and swift. Strange how a casual interchange of words with him would excite and agitate her. But it had been more than that. Everything was, with him.

He gave the sidewise toss of his head, which had come to be so familiar to her, as though he were tossing a lock of hair from his forehead, but he said nothing more, following her down the long hall in silence.

It was as though she had physically felt the steel of his blade slide gratingly once more down from her parry. Her mental attitude had been so entirely that of a fencer, on the alert, watchfully defensive against the quick-flashing attack of the opponent, that she had an instant's absurd fear of letting him walk behind her, as though she might feel a thrust in the back. "How ridiculous of me!" she told herself with an inward laugh of genuine amusement. "Women are as bad as fox-terriers for inventing exciting occasions out of nothing at all."

Then in a gust of deep anger, instantly come, instantly gone, "Why do I tolerate this for a moment? I was perfectly all right before. Why don't I simply send him about his business, as I would any other bold meddler?"

But after this, with an abrupt shift to another plane, "That would be acting preposterously, like a silly, self-consciously virtuous matron. What earthly difference does it make to me what a casual visitor to our town says or does to amuse himself in his casual stay, that may end at any moment? And how scarifyingly he would laugh at me, if he knew what comic relics of old prudish reflexes are stirred up by the contact with his mere human livingness. Heavens! How he would laugh to know me capable of being so 'guindée,' so personal, fearing like any school-girl a flirtation in any man's conversation. He must never see a trace of that. No matter how startled I ever am, he mustn't see anything but a smooth, amused surface. It would be intolerable to have him laugh at me."

Her hand was on the latch, when a deep, muffled murmur from the depths admonished her, "Personal vanity . . . that's what's at the bottom of all that you are telling yourself. It is a vain woman speaking, and fearing a wound to her vanity."

She resented this, pushed it back, and clicked the latch up firmly, stepping out into the transparent gold of the late-afternoon sunshine. She turned her head as her companion came up behind her on the garden path, half expecting to have his eyes meet hers with a visible shade of sardonic mockery, and prepared to meet it halfway with a similar amusement at the absurdity of human beings, herself included.

He was not looking at her at all, but straight before him, unconscious for an instant that she had turned her eyes on him, and in this instant before the customary mask of self-consciousness dropped over his face, she read there, plain and startling to see, unmistakable to her grown woman's experience of life, the marks of a deep, and painful, and present emotion.

All of her hair-splitting speculations withered to nothing. She did not even wonder what it was that moved him so strangely and dreadfully. There was no room for thought in the profound awed impersonal sympathy which with a great hush came upon her at the sight of another human being in pain.

He felt some intimate emanation from her, turned towards her, and for the faintest fraction of time they looked at each other through a rent in the veil of life.

Cousin Hetty's old voice called them cheerfully, "Over here, this way under the willow-tree."

They turned in that direction, to hear her saying, ". . . that was in 1763 and of course they came on horseback, using the Indian trails the men had learned during the French-and-Indian wars. Great-grandmother (she was a twelve-year-old girl then) had brought along a willow switch from their home in Connecticut. When the whole lot of them decided to settle here in the valley, and her folks took this land to be theirs, she stuck her willow switch into the ground, alongside the brook here, and this is the tree it grew to be. Looks pretty battered up, don't it, like other old folks."

Mr. Welles tipped his pale, quiet face back to look up at the great tree, stretching its huge, stiff old limbs mutilated by time and weather, across the tiny, crystal brook dimpling and smiling and murmuring among its many-colored pebbles. "Queer, isn't it," he speculated, "how old the tree has grown, and how the brook has stayed just as young as ever."

"It's the other way around between 'Gene Powers' house and his pine-tree," commented Aunt Hetty. "The pine-tree gets bigger and finer and stronger all the time, seems 'sthough, and the house gets more battered and feeble-looking."

Marise looked across at Marsh and found his eyes on her with an expression she rarely saw in them, almost a peaceful look, as of a man who has had something infinitely satisfying fall to his lot. He smiled at her gently, a good, quiet smile, and looked away into the extravagant splendor of a row of peonies.

Marise felt an inexplicable happiness, clear and sunny like the light in the old garden. She sat down on the bench and fell into a more relaxed and restful pose than she had known for some time. What a sweet and gracious thing life could be after all! Could there be a lovelier place on earth than here among Cousin Hetty's flower-children. Dear old Cousin Hetty, with her wrinkled, stiff exterior, and those bright living eyes of hers. She was the willow-tree outside and the brook inside, that's what she was. What tender childhood recollections were bound up with the sight of that quiet old face.

"And those rose-bushes," continued the old woman, "are all cuttings my great-great-grandmother brought up from Connecticut, and they came from cuttings our folks brought over from England, in 1634. If 'twas a little later in the season, and they were in bloom, you'd see how they're not nearly so I double as most roses. The petals are bigger and not so curled up, more like wild roses."

She sat down beside the others on the long wooden bench, and added, "I never dig around one of those bushes, nor cut a rose to put in a vase, without I feel as though Great-great-grandmother and Grandmother and all the rest were in me, still alive."

"Don't you think," asked Marise of the two men, "that there is something awfully sweet about feeling yourself a part of the past generations, like that? As we do here. To have such a familiarity with any corner of the earth . . . well, it seems to me like music, the more familiar it is, the dearer and closer it is . . . and when there are several generations of familiarity back of you. . . . I always feel as though my life were a part of something much bigger than just my life, when I feel it a continuation of their lives, as much as of my own childhood. It always seems deep and quieting to me."

Mr. Welles assented wistfully, "It makes me envious."

Marsh shook his head, sending up a meditative puff of smoke. "If you want to know how it really strikes me, I'll have to say it sounds plain sleepy to me. Deep and quieting all right, sure enough. But so's opium. And in my experience, most things just get duller and duller, the more familiar they are. I don't begin to have time in my life for the living I want to do, my own self! I can't let my grandmothers and grandfathers come shoving in for another whirl at it. They've had their turn. And my turn isn't a minute too long for me. Your notion looks to me . . . lots of old accepted notions look like that to me . . . like a good big dose of soothing syrup to get people safely past the time in their existences when they might do some sure-enough personal living on their own hook." He paused and added in a meditative murmur, "That time is so damn short as it is!"

He turned hastily to the old lady with an apology. "Why, I beg your pardon! I didn't realize I had gone on talking aloud. I was just thinking along to myself. You see, your soothing syrup is working on me, the garden, the sun, the stillness, all the grandmothers and grandfathers sitting around. I am almost half asleep."

"I'm an old maid, I know," said Cousin Hetty piquantly. "But I'm not a proper Massachusetts old maid. I'm Vermont, and a swear-word or two don't scare me. I was brought up on first-hand stories of Ethan Allen's talk, and . . ."

Marise broke in hastily, in mock alarm, "Now, Cousin Hetty, don't you start in on the story of Ethan Allen and the cowshed that was too short. I won't have our city visitors scandalized by our lack of . . ."

Cousin Hetty's laughter cut her short, as merry and young a sound as the voice of the brook. "I hadn't thought of that story in years!" she said. She and Marise laughed together, looking at each other. But they said nothing else.

"Aren't you going to tell us?" asked Mr. Welles with a genuine aggrieved surprise which tickled Cousin Hetty into more laughter.

"I shall not rest day or night, till I have found someone who knows that story," said Marsh, adding, "Old Mrs. Powers must know it. And she will love to tell it to me. It is evidently the sort of story which is her great specialty."

They all laughed, foolishly, light-heartedly.

Marise consciously delighted in the laughter, in the silly, light tone of their talk, in the feeling of confidence and security which bathed her as warmly as the new wine of the spring sunshine. She thought passingly, swiftly, with her habitual, satiric wonder at her own fancifulness, of her earlier notions about steel blades and passes and parries, and being afraid to walk down the hall with her "opponent" back of her.

Her opponent, this potent, significant personality, lounging on the bench beside her, resting in the interval of a life the intensity of which was out of her world altogether, the life, all power, of a modern rich man in great affairs; controlling vast forces, swaying and shaping the lives of thousands of weaker men as no potentate had ever done, living in the instants he allowed himself for personal life (she felt again the pang of her sympathy for his look of fierce, inexplicable pain) with a concentration in harmony with the great scale of his other activities. It was, just as the cheap novels called it, a sort, a bad, inhuman, colorful, fascinating sort of modern version of the superman's life, she reflected. She had been ridiculous to project her village insignificance into that large-scale landscape.

A distant whistle blew a long, full note, filling the valley with its vibrations.

"Is that a train, at this hour?" murmured Mr. Welles. His voice was sunk to a somnolent monotone, his hands folded over his waistcoat moved slowly and rhythmically with his breathing. It was evident that he did not in the least care whether it was a train or not.

"Oh no!" said Marise, severely, disapproving the vagueness and inaccuracy of his observation. "That's the mill-whistle, blowing the closing-hour. You're no true Ashleyan, not to have learned the difference between the voices of the different whistles of the day."

She turned to Marsh, tilting her wings for a capricious flight. "I think it's part of the stubborn stiff-jointedness of human imagination, don't you, that we don't hear the beauty of those great steam-whistles. I wonder if it's not unconscious art that gave to our mighty machines such voices of qower."

"Isn't it perhaps ostentatious to call the family saw-mill a 'mighty machine'?" inquired Marsh mildly. He sat at the end of the bench, his arm along the back behind Mr. Welles, his head turned to the side, his soft hat pulled low over his forehead, looking at the garden and at Marise out of half-shut, sleepy eyes.

Marise went on, drawing breath for a longer flight. "When the train comes sweeping up the valley, trailing its great beautiful banner of smoke, I feel as though it were the crescendo announcing something, and at the crossing, when that noble rounded note blares out . . . why, it's the music for the setting. Nothing else could cope with the depth of the valley, the highness and blackness of its mountain walls, and the steepness of the Eagle Rocks."

"I call that going some, 'noble rounded note'!" murmured Marsh, lifting his eyebrows with a visible effort and letting his eyes fall half shut, against the brilliance of the sunshine.

Marise laughed, and persisted. "Just because its called a steam-whistle, we won't hear its beauty and grandeur, till something else has been invented to take its place, and then we'll look back sentimentally and regret it."

"Maybe you will," conceded Marsh.

The two elder looked on, idly amused at this give-and-take.

"And I don't suppose," continued Marise, "to take another instance of modern lack of imagination, that you have ever noticed, as an element of picturesque power in modern life, the splendid puissance of the traffic cop's presence in a city street."

They all had a protesting laugh at this, startled for an instant from their dreaminess.

"Yes, and if I could think of more grandiloquent words to express him, I'd use them," said Marise defiantly, launching out into yet more outrageous flights of rhetoric. "I could stand for hours on a street corner, admiring the completeness with which he is transfigured out of the human limitations of his mere personality, how he feels, flaming through his every vein and artery, the invincible power of THE LAW, freely set over themselves by all those turbulent, unruly human beings, surging around him in their fiery speed-genii. He raises his arm. It is not a human arm, it is the decree of the entire race. And as far as it can be seen, all those wilful fierce creatures bow themselves to it. The current boils past him in one direction. He lets it go till he thinks fit to stop it. He sounds his whistle, and raises his arm again in that inimitable gesture of omnipotence. And again they bow themselves. Now that the priest before the altar no longer sways humanity as he did, is there anywhere else, any other such visible embodiment of might, majesty, and power as . . ."

"Gracious me, Marise!" warned her old cousin. "I know you're only running on with your foolishness, but I think you're going pretty far when you mix a policeman up with priests and altars and things. I don't believe Mr. Bayweather would like that very well."

"He wouldn't mind," demurred Marise. "He'd think it an interesting historical parallel."

"Mrs. Bayweather would have a thing or two to say."

"Right you are. Mrs. Bayweather would certainly say something!" agreed Marise.

She stood up. "I'm hypnotized into perfect good-for-nothingness like the rest of you by the loveliness of the afternoon and the niceness of everybody. Here it is almost eating-time and I haven't even opened the baskets. No, don't you move," she commanded the others, beginning to stir from their nirvana to make dutiful offers of help. "I'll call the children. And Neale will be here in a moment."

She went back to the house, down the long walk, under the grape-arbor, still only faintly shaded with sprigs of pale green. She was calling, "Children! Children! Come and help with the supper."

She vanished into the house. There was a moment or two of intense quiet, in which the almost horizontal rays of the setting sun poured a flood of palpable gold on the three motionless figures in the garden.

Then she emerged again, her husband beside her, carrying the largest of the baskets, the children struggling with other baskets, a pail, an ice-cream-freezer, while the dog wove circles about them, wrought to exaltation by the complicated smell of the eatables.

"Neale was just coming in the front gate," she explained, as he nodded familiarly to the men and bent to kiss the old woman's cheek. "Cousin Hetty, just look at Elly in that night-cap of Great-aunt Pauline's. Doesn't she look the image of that old daguerreotype of Grandmother? See here, Mark, who said you could trail that sword out here? That belongs in the attic."

"Oh, let him, let him," said Cousin Hetty peaceably.

"There's nothing much less breakable than a sword. He can't hurt it."

"I've woren it lots of times before," said Mark. "Aunt Hetty always let me to. Favver, won't you 'trap it tight to me, so's I won't 'traddle it so much."

"Mother," said Elly, coming up close to Marise, as she stood unpacking the dishes, "I was looking inside that old diary, the one in the red leather cover, your grandmother's, I guess, the diary she wrote when she was a young lady. And she was having a perfectly dreadful time whether she could believe the Doctrine of the Trinity. She seemed to feel so bad about it. She wrote how she couldn't sleep nights, and cried, and everything. It was the Holy Ghost she couldn't make any sense out of. Mother, what in the world is the Doctrine of the Trinity?

"For mercy's sakes!" cried Cousin Hetty. "I never saw such a family! Elly, what won't you be up to, next? I can't call that a proper thing for a little girl to talk about, right out, so."

"Mother, you tell me," said Elly, looking up into her mother's face with the expression of tranquil trust which was like a visible radiance. Marise always felt scared, she told herself, when Elly looked at her like that. She made a little helpless shrugged gesture of surrender with her shoulders, setting down on the table a plate of cold sliced lamb. "Elly, darling, I can't stop just this minute to tell you about it, and anyhow I don't understand any more about it than Grandmother did. But I don't care if I don't. The first quiet minute we have together, I'll tell you enough so you can understand why she cared."

"All right, when I go to bed tonight I'll remind you to," Elly made the engagement definite. She added, with a shout, "Oh, Mother, chicken sandwiches! Oh, I didn't know we were going to have chicken sandwiches. Mother, can't we begin now? I'm awfully hungry."

"Hello," said Neale, looking back toward the house. "Here comes Eugenia, arisen from her nap. Paul, run back into the house and bring out another chair. Marise, have you explained who Eugenia is?"

"Oh là, là, no!" exclaimed Marise. "I forgot they didn't know her. Quick, you do it, Neale."

"Old friend of my wife's, sort of half-cousin several-times removed, schoolmates in France together, the kind of old family friend who comes and goes in the house at will," said Neale rapidly. "Cultivated, artistic, and so on."

"Oh, Neale, how slightingly you put it!" cried Marise under her breath. "She's made herself into one of the rarest and most finished creations!"

Neale went on rapidly, in a low tone as the newcomer stepped slowly down the path, "She toils not, neither does she spin . . . doesn't have to. Highbrow, very, and yet stylish, very! Most unusual combination." He added as final information, "Spinster, by conviction," as he stepped forward to greet her.

The other two men stood up to be presented to the newcomer, who, making everything to Marise's eyes seem rough and countrified, advanced towards them, self-possessed, and indifferent to all those eyes turned on her. In her gleaming, supple dress of satin-like ivory jersey, she looked some tiny, finished, jewel-object, infinitely breakable, at which one ought only to look if it were safely behind glass.

"There is someone of Marsh's own world, the 'great world' he speaks of," thought Marise. She was not aware of any wistfulness in her recognition of this fact, but she was moved to stand closer to her husband, and once as she moved about, setting the table, to lay her fingers for an instant on his hand.

"We're going to have ice-cream, Eugenia," announced Paul, leaning on the arm of her chair after she and all the others were seated again.

"That's good news," she said equably. She laid a small, beautiful hand on the child's shoulder, and with a smooth, imperceptible movement, set him a little further from her. Paul did not observe this manoeuver, but his mother did, with an inward smile. "Paul, don't hang on Eugenia like that," she called to him.

"But she smells so sweet!" protested the little boy.

Mr. Welles held out a sympathizing hand and drew the child to him. He too had seen that gesture.

"Come here, all you little folks," ordered Marise, now seriously beginning to serve the meal, "and start waiting on the table."

"Cold lamb!" cried Cousin Hetty with enthusiasm. "I'm so glad. Agnes won't touch mutton or lamb. She says they taste so like a sheep. And so we don't often have it."

"Paul, can you be trusted to pour the hot chocolate?" asked his mother. "No, Neale, don't get up. I want to see if the children can't do it all."

From where she sat at the foot of the table, she directed the operations. The children stepped about, serious, responsible, their rosy faces translucent in the long, searching, level rays sent up by the sun, low in The Notch. Dishes clicked lightly, knives and forks jingled, cups were set back with little clinking noises on saucers. All these indoor sounds were oddly diminished and unresonant under the open sky, just as the chatting, laughing flow of the voices, even though it rose at times to bursts of mirth which the children's shouts made noisy, never drowned out the sweet, secret talk of the brook to itself.

Marise was aware of all this, richly and happily aware of the complexities of an impression whose total seemed to her, for the moment, felicity itself. It pleased her, all, every bit of it, pleased and amused her; the dear children, Paul worshiping at the shrine of Eugenia's elegancies, Mark the absurd darling with that grotesque sword between his legs, Elly devouring her favorite sandwich with impassioned satisfaction and wondering about the Holy Ghost; Cousin Hetty, ageless, pungent, and savory as one of her herbs; Mr. Welles, the old tired darling come into his haven, loving Paul as he would his own grandson; Eugenia orchid-like against their apple-blossom rusticity; Marsh . . . how tremendously more simpático he had seemed this afternoon than ever before, as though one might really like him, and not just find him exciting and interesting; Neale, dear Neale with his calm eyes into which it did everyone good to look. All of them at ease, friendly, enjoying food, the visible world, and each other. Where, after all, were those traditional, troubling, insoluble intricacies of human relationships which had been tormenting her and darkening her sky? It was all so good and simple if one could only remain good and simple oneself. There was no lightning to fear in that lucent sunset air.

Presently, as the talk turned on flowers and the dates of their blooming, Eugenia said to her casually, "Marisette, here we are the first of June and past, and the roses here are less advanced than they were at Tivoli the last of March. Do you remember the day when a lot of us sat outdoors and ate a picnic dinner, just as we do now? It was the day we climbed Monte Cavo."

Marise explained, "Miss Mills is a friend who dates back even before my husband's time, back to our student days in Rome." To Eugenia she said, "You're giving us both away and showing how long ago it is, and how you've forgotten about details. We never could have climbed up Monte Cavo, the day we went to Tivoli. They don't go on the same excursion, at all."

"That's true," agreed Eugenia indifferently, "you're right. Monte Cavo goes with the Rocca di Papa expedition."

Before she could imagine a possible reason, Marise felt her hands go cold and moist. The sky seemed to darken and lower above her. Eugenia went on, "And I never went to Rocca di Papa with you, at all, I'm sure of that. That was a trip you took after you had dropped me for Neale. In fact, it was on that very expedition that you got formally engaged, don't you remember? You and Neale walked over from Monte Cavo and only just caught the last car down."

Ridiculous! Preposterous! Marise told herself that it was not possible that her hands were trembling so. It was merely a physical reaction, such as one had when startled by some trivial sudden event. But she couldn't make them stop trembling. She couldn't make them stop.

What nonsense to be so agitated. Nobody could remember the name from that evening, weeks and weeks ago. And what if they did? What could they make of it?

It seemed to her that dusk had fallen in the garden. Where was that lucent sunset air?

She heard Eugenia's voice going on, and Neale chiming in with a laugh, and did not understand what they said. Surely everybody must have forgotten.

She hazarded a quick glance at Mr. Welles' face and drew a long breath of relief. He had forgotten, that was evident. She looked beyond him to Marsh. He too would certainly have forgotten.

He was waiting for her eyes. And when they met his, she felt the lightning flash. He had not forgotten.

Marsh suddenly found it unbearable. He wasn't used to keeping the curb on himself like this, and he hadn't the least intention of learning how to do it. A fierce, physical irritability overcame him, and he stopped short in the hall, just because he could not stand the silly chatter that was always flowing from these silly people about their foolish affairs. If they only knew what he was leaving unsaid!

He had not meant to make Marise halt, too, his movement having been a mere unconsidered reflex, but of course she did stop, apparently surprised by the brusqueness of his action, and faced him there in the dusky hall-way. She was so close to him that he could see every detail of her face and person, just as he could at night when he closed his eyes; so close that for an instant he felt her breath on his face. He ground his teeth, minded, that instant, to throw down the trumpery little wall of convention. It couldn't stand, he knew with an experienced certainty of his own power that it couldn't stand for an instant against him. The day he chose to put his shoulder to it, down it would go in a heap of rubble.

But the wall was not all. Usually it was all. But with this woman it was nothing, a mere accident. Beyond it she stood, valid, and looked at him out of those long eyes of hers. What was in her mind? She looked at him now, quietly, just as usual, made some light casual remark, and effortlessly, as though she had some malign and invincible charm, she had passed from out his power again, and was walking with that straight, sure tread of hers, down to the door.

If he could have done it, he would have struck at her from behind.

He could get no hold on her, could not take the first step. All during those weeks and weeks, he had thrown out his net, and had caught enough facts, Lord knows. But had he any certainty that he had put them together right? He had not yet caught in her any one tone or look or phrase that would give him the unmistakable clue. He had set down words and words and words that would tell him what her life really was, if he only knew the alphabet of her language. He might be making a fool of himself with his almost certainty that she was conscious of having outgrown, like a splendid tropical tree, the wretched little kitchen-garden where fate had transplanted her. When he could stamp down his heat of feeling and let his intelligence have a moment's play, he was perfectly capable of seeing that he might be misinterpreting everything he had observed. For instance, that evening over the photograph-album with her betrayal of some strong feeling of distaste for the place near Rome. It was evident, from her tone, her look, her gesture, that the name of it brought up some acutely distasteful memory to her, but that could mean anything, or nothing. It might be merely some sordid accident, as that a drunken workman had said something brutal to her there. Women of her sort, he knew, never forgot those things. Or any one of a thousand such incidents. He would never know the significance of that gesture of shrinking of hers.

As he walked behind her, he looked hard at her back, with its undulating, vase-like beauty, so close to him; and felt her immeasurably distant. She opened the door now and went out into the sunlight, stepping a little to one side as though to make room for him to come up beside her. He found that he knew every turn of her head, every poise of her shoulders and action of her hands, the whole rhythm of her body, as though they were his own. And there she passed from him, far and remote.

A sudden certainty of fore-ordained defeat came over him, as he had never known before. He was amazed at the violence of his pain, intolerable, intolerable!

She turned her head quickly and caught his eyes in this instant of inexplicable suffering.

What miraculous thing happened then? It seemed to him that her face wavered in golden rays, from the radiance of her eyes. For she did not withdraw her gaze. She looked at him with an instant, profound sympathy and pity, no longer herself, transfigured, divine by the depth of her humanity.

The sore bitterness went out from his heart.

A voice called. She turned away. He felt himself following her. He looked about him, light-headed with relief from pain. The quiet, flowering world shimmered rainbow-like. What a strange power one human being could have with another that a look could be an event!

He walked more slowly, feeling with a curious pleasure the insatiable desire for possession ebbing from him. Why not let it ebb entirely? Why not enjoy the ineffable sweetness of what he could have? That was what would please her, what she would like, what she would give, freely. In this moment of hush, he quite saw how it would be possible, although he had never for a moment before in his life believed it. Yes, possible and lovely. After all, he must stop sometime, and take the slower pace. Why not now, when there was a certain and great prize to be won . . . ?

People talked around him. He talked and did not know his own words. Marise spun those sparkling webs of nonsense of hers, and made him laugh, but the next moment he could not have told what she had said. He must somehow have been very tired to take such intense pleasure in being at rest.

Her husband came, that rough and energetic husband. The children came, the children whose restless, selfish, noisy preying on their mother usually annoyed him so, and still the charm was not broken. Marise, as she always did when her husband and children were there, retreated into a remote plane of futile busyness with details that servants should have cared for; answering the children's silly questions, belonging to everyone, her personal existence blotted out. But this time he felt still, deep within him, the penetrating sweetness of her eyes as she had looked at him.

A tiresome, sophisticated friend of Marise's came, too, somehow intruding another personality into the circle, already too full, and yet he was but vaguely irritated by her. She only brought out by contrast the thrilling quality of Marise's golden presence. He basked in that, as in the sunshine, and thought of nothing else.

Possibilities he had never dreamed of, stretched before him, possibilities of almost impersonal and yet desirable existence. Perhaps this was the turning-point of his life. He supposed there really was one, sometime, for everybody.

". . . Rocca di Papa . . ." someone had said. Or had he dreamed it? He awoke with an inward bound, like a man springing up from sleep at a sudden noise. His first look was for Marise. She was pale. He had not dreamed it.

The voice went on . . . the newcomer's, the one they called Eugenia . . . yes, she had known them in Italy. Marise had just said they had been friends before her marriage.

The voice went on. How he listened as though crouched before the keyhole of a door! Only three or four sentences, quite casual and trivial in content, pronounced in that self-consciously cosmopolitan accent. Then the voice stopped.

It had said enough for him. Now he knew. Now he had that clue.

He had the sensation of rising to his full height, exultantly, every faculty as alert as though he had never been drugged to sleep by those weak notions of renunciation. The consciousness of power was like a sweet taste in his mouth. The deep, fundamental, inalienable need for possession stretched itself, titanic and mighty, refreshed, reposed, and strengthened by the involuntary rest it had had.

He fixed his eyes on Marise, waiting for the first interchange of a look. He could see that her hands were trembling; and smiled to himself. She was looking at the old man.

Now, in a moment she would look at him.

There were her eyes. She had looked at him. Thunder rolled in his ears.

HEARD FROM THE STUDY

From his desk in the inner room where he finally buckled down to those estimates about the popple-wood casters, Neale could follow, more or less closely, as his attention varied, the evening activities of the household.

First there had been the clinking and laughter from the dining-room and kitchen where Marise and the children cleared off the table and washed the dishes. How sweet their voices sounded, all light and gay! Every occasion for being with their mother was fun for the kids. How happy Marise made them! And how they throve in that happiness like little plants in the sunshine!

When you really looked at what went on about you, how funny and silly lots of traditional ideas did seem. That notion, solemnly accepted by the would-be sophisticated moderns, for instance, that a woman of beauty and intelligence was being wasted unless she was engaged in being the "emotional inspiration" of some man's life: which meant in plain English, stimulating his sexual desire to that fever-heat which they called impassioned living. As if there were not a thousand other forms of deep fulfilment in life. People who thought that, how narrow and cramped they seemed, and blinded to the bigness and variety of life! But then, of course, everybody hadn't had under his eyes a creature genuinely rich and various, like Marise, and hadn't seen how all children feasted on her charm like bees on honey, and how old people adored her, and how, just by being herself, she enriched and civilized every life that touched her, and made every place she lived in a home for the human spirit. And Heaven knew she was, with all that, the real emotional inspiration of a man's life, a man who loved her a thousand times more than in his ignorant and passionate youth.

Come, this wasn't work. He might as well have stayed out with the family and helped with the dishes. This was being like Eugenia Mills, who always somehow had something to do upstairs when there was any work to do downstairs. Eugenia was a woman who somehow managed to stand from under life, anyhow, had been the most successful draft-dodger he knew. No call had been urgent enough to get her to the recruiting station to shoulder her share of what everybody had to do. But what did she get out of her successful shirking? She was in plain process of drying up and blowing away.

He turned to his desk and drew out the papers which had the figures and estimates on that popple. He would see if the Warner woodlot had as much popple and basswood on it as they thought. It would, of course, be easiest to get it off that lot, if there were enough of it to fill the order for casters. The Hemmingway lot and the Dornwood lot oughtn't to be lumbered except in winter, with snow for the sleds. But you could haul straight downhill from the Warner lot, even on wheels, using the back lane in the Eagle Rocks woods. There was a period of close attention to his papers, when he heard nothing at all of what went on in the rooms next his study. His mind was working with the rapid, trained exactitude which was a delight to him, with a sure, firm grasp on the whole problem in all its complicated parts.

Finally he nodded with satisfaction, pushed the papers away, and lighted his pipe, contentedly. He had it by the tail.

He leaned back in his chair, drawing on the newly lighted pipe and ruminating again. He thought to himself that he would like to see any other man in the valley who could make an estimate like that, and be sure of it, who would know what facts to gather and where to get them, on the cost of cutting and hauling in different seasons, on mill-work and transportation and overhead expenses, and how to market and where, and how to get money and how to get credit and how to manage these cranky independent Yankees and the hot-tempered irresponsible Canucks. It was all very well for advanced radicals to say that the common workmen in a business were as good as the head of the concern. They weren't and that was all there was to be said about it. Any one of them, any single one of his employees, put in his place as manager, would run the business into a hole as deep as hell inside six months. And if you put the whole lot of them at it, it would only be six weeks instead of six months before the bust-up.

There again, what people kept saying about life, things clever people said and that got accepted as the clever things to say, how awfully beside the mark they seem to you, when you found out actual facts by coming up against them. What a difference some first-hand experience with what you were talking about, did make with what you said. What clever folks ought to say was not that the workmen were as good as the head or the same sort of flesh and blood, because they weren't; but that the head exploited his natural capacities out of all proportion, getting such an outrageous share of the money they all made together, for doing what was natural to him, and what he enjoyed doing. Take himself for instance. If by some freak, he could make more money out of being one of the hands, would he go down in the ranks, stand at a machine all day and cut the same wooden shapes, hour after hour: or drive a team day after day where somebody else told him to go? You bet your life he wouldn't! He didn't need all the money he could squeeze out of everybody concerned, to make him do his job as manager. His real pay was the feeling of managing, of doing a job he was fitted for, and that was worth doing.

How fine it had always been of Marise to back him up in that view of the business, not to want him to cheat the umpire, even if he could get away with it, even though it would have meant enough sight more money for them, even though the umpire didn't exist as yet, except in his own conscience, in his own idea of what he was up to in his business. Never once had Marise had a moment of that backward-looking hankering for more money that turned so many women into pillars of salt and their husbands into legalized sneak-thieves.

He pulled out some of the letters from Canada about the Powers case, and fingered them over a little. He had brought them home this evening, and it wasn't the first time either, to try to get a good hour alone with Marise to talk it over with her. He frowned as he reflected that he seemed to have had mighty little chance for talking anything over with Marise since his return. There always seemed to be somebody sticking around; one of the two men next door, who didn't have anything to do but stick around, or Eugenia, who appeared to have settled down entirely on them this time. Well, perhaps it was just as well to wait a little longer and say nothing about it, till he had those last final verifications in his hands.

What in thunder did Eugenia come to visit them for, anyhow? Their way of life must make her sick. Why did she bother? Oh, probably her old affection for Marise. They had been girls together, of course, and Marise had been good to her. Women thought more of those old-time relations than men. Well, he could stand Eugenia if she could stand them, he guessed. But she wasn't one who grew on him with the years.

He had less and less patience with those fussy little ways, found less and less amusing those frequent, small cat-like gestures of hers, picking off an invisible thread from her sleeve, rolling it up to an invisible ball between her white finger and thumb, and casting it delicately away; or settling a ring, or brushing off invisible dust with a flick of a polished finger-nail; all these manoeuvers executed with such leisure and easy deliberation that they didn't make her seem restless, and you knew she calculated that effect. A man who had had years with a real, living woman like Marise, didn't know whether to laugh or swear at such mannerisms and the self-consciousness that underlay them.

There she was coming down the stairs now, when she heard Marise at the piano, with the children, and knew there was no more work to be done. Pshaw! He had meant to go out and join the others, but now he would wait a while, till he had finished his pipe. A pipe beside Eugenia's perfumed cigarettes always seemed so gross. And he wanted to lounge at his ease, stretch out in his arm-chair with his feet on another. Could you do that, with Eugenia fashion-plating herself on the sofa?

He leaned back smoking peacefully, listening to Marise's voice brimming up all around the children's as they romped through "The raggle-taggle gypsies, oh!"

What a mastery of the piano Marise had, subduing it to the slender pipe of those child-voices as long as they sang, and rolling out sumptuous harmonies in the intervals of the song. Lucky kids! Lucky kids! to have childhood memories like that.

He heard Paul say, "Now let's sing 'Massa's in the cold, cold ground,'" and Elly shriek out, "No, Mother, no! It's so terribly sad! I can't stand it!" And Paul answer with that certainty of his always being in the right, "Aw, Elly, it's not fair. Is it, Mother, fair to have Elly keep us from singing one of the nicest songs we have, just because she's so foolish?"

His father frowned. Queer about Paul. He'd do anything for Elly if he thought her in trouble, would stand up for her against the biggest bully of the school-yard. But he couldn't keep himself from . . . it was perhaps because Paul could not understand that . . . now how could Marise meet this little problem in family equity, he wondered? Her solutions of the children's knots always tickled him.

She was saying, "Let's see. Elly, it doesn't look to me as though you had any right to keep Paul from singing a song he likes. And, Paul, it doesn't seem as though you had any right to make Elly listen to a song that makes her cry. Let's settle it this way. We can't move the piano, but we can move Elly. Elly dear, suppose you go 'way out through the kitchen and shut both doors and stand on the back porch. Touclé will probably be there, looking out, the way she does evenings, so you won't be alone. I'll send Mark out to get you when we're through. And because it's not very much fun to stand out in the dark, you can stop and get yourself a piece of cocoanut cake as you go through the pantry."

Neale laughed silently to himself as he heard the doors open and shut and Elly's light tread die away. How perfectly Marise understood her little daughter! It wasn't only over the piano that Marise had a mastery, but over everybody's nature. She played on them as surely, as richly as on any instrument. That's what he called real art-in-life. Why wasn't it creative art, as much as anything, her Blondin-like accuracy of poise among all the conflicting elements of family-life, the warring interests of the different temperaments, ages, sexes, natures? Why wasn't it an artistic creation, the unbroken happiness and harmony she drew out of those elements, as much as the picture the painter drew out of the reds and blues and yellows on his palette? If it gave an actor a high and disinterested pleasure when he had an inspiration, or heard himself give out a true and freshly found intonation, or make exactly the right gesture, whether anybody in the audience applauded him or not, why wouldn't the mother of a family and maker of a home have the same pleasure, and by heck! just as high and disinterested, when she had once more turned the trick, had an inspiration, and found a course that all her charges, young and old, could steer together? Well, there was one, anyhow, of Marise's audience who often gave her a silent hand-clap of admiration.

The wailing, lugubrious notes of the negro lament rose now, Paul's voice loud and clear and full of relish. "It takes a heavy stimulant to give Paul his sensations," thought his father. "What would take the hide right off of Elly, just gives him an agreeable tingle." His pipe went out as he listened, and he reached for a match. The song stopped. Someone had come in. He heard Paul's voice cry joyfully, "Oh goody, Mr. Welles, come on up to the piano."

Neale leaned forward with a slightly unpleasant stirring of his blood and listened to see if the old man had come alone. No, of course he hadn't. He never did.

There was Eugenia's voice saying, "Good-evening, Mr. Marsh." She would move over for him on the sofa and annex him with a look. Well, let her have him. He was her kind more than theirs, the Lord knew. Probably he was used to having that sort of woman annex him.

Neale moved his head restlessly and shifted his position. His pipe and his arm-chair had lost their savor. The room seemed hot to him and he got up to open a window. Standing there by the open sash, looking out into the blue, misty glory of an overclouded moonlight night, he decided that he would not go in at all, and join them. He felt tired and out of sorts, he found. And they were such infernal talkers, Eugenia and Marsh. It wore you out to hear them, especially as you felt all the time that their speculations on life and human nature were so far off, that it would be just wasting your breath to try to set them right. He'd stay here in the study and smoke and maybe doze off a little, till they went away. Marise had known he had business figuring to do, and she would have a perfectly valid excuse to give them for his non-appearance. Not that he had any illusions as to anybody there missing him at all.

He heard Mark's little voice sound shrilly from the pantry, "Come on, Elly. It's all right. I've even putten away the book that's got that song."

Some splendid, surging shouts from the piano and the voices began on "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Neale could hear Mr. Welles' shaky old bass booming away this time. He was probably sitting down with Paul on his knees. It was really nice of the old codger to take such a fancy to Paul, and be able to see those sterling qualities of his, through Paul's surface unloveliness that came mostly from his slowness of imagination.

The voices stopped; Elly said, "That song sounds as if it were proud of itself." Her father's heart melted in the utter prostration of tenderness he felt for his little daughter. How like Elly! What a quick intelligence animated the sensitive, touching, appealing, defenseless darling that Elly was! Marise must have been a little girl like that. Think of her growing up in such an atmosphere of disunion and flightiness as that weak mother of hers must have given her. Queer, how Marise didn't seem to have a trace of that weakness, unless it was that funny physical impressionableness of hers, that she could laugh at herself, but that still wrought on her, so that if measles were going the rounds, she could see symptoms of measles in everything the children did or didn't do; or that well-known habit of hers, that even the children laughed about with her, of feeling things crawling all over her for hours after she had seen a caterpillar. Well, that was only the other side of her extraordinary sensitiveness, that made her know how everybody was feeling, and what to do to make him feel better. She had often said that she would certainly die if she ever tried to study medicine, because as fast as she read of a symptom she would have it, herself. But she wouldn't die. She'd live and make a cracker-jack of a doctor, if she'd ever tried it, enough sight better than some callous brute of a boy with no imagination.

"One more song before bed-time," announced Marise. "And we'll let Mark choose. It's his turn."

A long silence, in which Neale amusedly divined Mark torn between his many favorites. Finally the high sweet little treble, "Well, let's make it 'Down Among the Dead Men.'"

At which Neale laughed silently again. What a circus the kids were!

The clock struck nine as they finished this, and Neale heard the stir and shifting of chairs. Paul said, "Mother, Mr. Welles and I have fixed it up, that he's going to put us to bed tonight, if you'll let him." Amused surprise from Marise: Mr. Welles' voice saying he really would like it, never had seen any children in their nightgowns except in the movies; Paul saying, "Gracious! We don't wear nightgowns like women. We wear pajamas!"; Mark's voice crying, "We'll show you how we play foot-fight on the rug. We have to do that barefoot, so each one can tickle ourselves;" as usual, no sound from Elly probably still reveling in the proudness of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."

A clatter of feet on the stairs, the chirping voices muffled by the shutting of a door overhead, and Eugenia's voice, musical and carefully modulated, saying, "Well, Marisette, you look perfectly worn out with fatigue. You haven't looked a bit well lately, anyhow. And I'm not surprised. The way those children take it out of you!"

"Damn that woman!" thought Neale. That sterile life of hers had starved out from her even the capacity to understand a really human existence when she saw it. Not that she had ever seemed to have any considerable seed-bed of human possibilities to be starved, even in youth, if he could judge from his memory, now very dim, of how she had seemed to him in Rome, when he had first met her, along with Marise. He remembered that he had said of her fantastically, to a fellow in the pension, that she reminded him of a spool of silk thread. And now the silk thread had all been wound off, and there was only the bare wooden spool left.

"It's not surprising that Mrs. Crittenden gets tired," commented Marsh's voice. "She does the work of four or five persons."

"Yes," agreed Eugenia, "I don't know how she does it . . . cook, nurse, teacher, housekeeper, welfare-worker, seamstress, gardener . . ."

"Oh, let up, let up!" Neale heard Marise say, with an impatience that pleased him. She must have been at the piano as she spoke, for at once there rose, smiting to the heart, the solemn, glorious, hopeless chords of the last part of the Pathetic Symphony. Heavens! How Marise could play!

When the last dull, dreary, beautiful note had vibrated into silence, Eugenia murmured, "Doesn't that always make you want to crawl under the sod and pull the daisies over you?"

"Ashes, ashes, not daisies," corrected Marsh, dreamily.

There was, thought Neale listening critically to their intonations, a voluptuous, perverse pleasure in despair which he found very distasteful. Despair was a real and honest and deadly emotion. Folks with appetites sated by having everything they wanted, oughtn't to use despair as a sort of condiment to perk up their jaded zest in life. "Confounded play-actors!" he thought, and wondered what Marise's reaction to them was.

He foresaw that it was going to be too much for his patience to listen to them. He would get too hot under the collar and be snappish, afterwards. Luckily he was in the library. There were better voices to listen to. He got up, ran his forefinger along a shelf, and took down a volume of Trevelyan, "Garbaldi and the Thousand." The well-worn volume opened of itself at a familiar passage, the description of the battle of Calatafimi. His eye lighted in anticipation. There was a man's book, he thought. But his pipe was out. He laid the book down to light it before he began to read. In spite of himself he listened to hear what they were saying now in the next room. Eugenia was talking and he didn't like what she was saying about those recurrent dreams of Marise's, because he knew it was making poor Marise squirm. She had such a queer, Elly-like shyness about that notion of hers, Marise had. It evidently meant more to her than she had ever been able to make him understand. He couldn't see why she cared so much about it, hated to have it talked about casually. But he wasn't Eugenia. If Marise didn't want it talked about casually, by George he wasn't the one who would mention it. They'd hardly ever spoken of them, those dreams, even to each other. People had a right to moral privacy, if they wanted it, he supposed, even married women. There was nothing so ruthless anyhow as an old childhood friend, to whom you had made foolish youthful confidences and who brought them out any time he felt like it.

"You ought to have those dreams of yours psycho-analyzed, Marisette," Eugenia was saying. To Marsh she went on in explanation, "Mrs. Crittenden has always had a queer kind of dream. I remember her telling me about them, years ago, when we were girls together, and nobody guessed there was anything in dreams. She dreams she is in some tremendous rapid motion, a leaf on a great river-current, or a bird blown by a great wind, or foam driven along by storm-waves, isn't that it, Marisonne?"

Neale did not need the sound of Marise's voice to know how she hated this. She said, rather shortly for her, as though she didn't want to say a word about it, and yet couldn't leave it uncorrected, "Not exactly. I don't dream I'm the leaf on the current. I dream I am the current myself, part of it. I'm the wind, not the bird blown by it; the wave itself; it's too hard to explain."

"Do you still have those dreams once in a while, Marisette, and do you still love them as much?"

"Oh yes, sometimes."

"And have you ever had the same sensation in your waking moments? I remember so well you used to say that was what you longed for, some experience in real life that would make you have that glorious sense of irresistible forward movement. We used to think," said Eugenia, "that perhaps falling in love would give it to you."

"No," said Marise. "I've never felt it, out of my dreams."

Neale was sorry he had elected to stay in the study. If he were out there now, he could change the conversation, come to her rescue. Couldn't Eugenia see that she was bothering Marise!

"What do you suppose Freud would make out of such dreams?" asked Eugenia, evidently of Marsh.

"Why, it sounds simple enough to me," said Marsh, and Neale was obliged to hand it to him that the very sound of his voice had a living, real, genuine accent that was a relief after Eugenia. He didn't talk half-chewed and wholly undigested nonsense, the way Eugenia did. Neale had heard enough of his ideas to know that he didn't agree with a word the man said, but at least it was a vital and intelligent personality talking.

"Why, it sounds simple enough to me. Americans have fadded the thing into imbecility, so that the very phrase has become such a bromide one hates to pronounce it. But of course the commonplace that all dreams are expressions of suppressed desires is true. And it's very apparent that Mrs. Crittenden's desire is a very fine one for freedom and power and momentum. She's evidently not a back-water personality. Though one would hardly need psycho-analysis to guess that!" He changed the subject as masterfully as Neale could have done. "See here, Mrs. Crittenden, that Tschaikowsky whetted my appetite for more. Don't you feel like playing again?"

The idea came over Neale, and in spite of his uneasy irritation, it tickled his fancy, that possibly Marsh found Eugenia just as deadly as he did.

Marise jumped at the chance to turn the talk, for in an instant the piano began to chant again, not Tschaikowsky, Neale noted, but some of the new people whom Marise was working over lately. He couldn't understand a note of them, nor keep his mind on them, nor even try to remember their names. He had been able to get just as far as Debussy and no further, he thought whimsically, before his brain-channels hardened in incipient middle-age.

He plunged into Trevelyan and the heart-quickening ups and downs of battle.

Some time after this, he was pulled back from those critical and glorious hours by the consciousness, gradually forcing itself on him on two discomforts; his pipe had gone out and Eugenia was at it again. He scratched a match and listened in spite of himself to that smooth liquid voice. She was still harping on psycho-analysis. Wasn't she just the kind of woman for whom that would have an irresistible fascination! He gathered that Marise was objecting to it, just as sweepingly as Eugenia was approving. How women did hate half-tones and reasonable qualifications!

"I'm a gardener," Marise was saying, "and I know a thing or two about natural processes. The thing to do with a manure pile is not to paw it over and over, but to put it safely away in the dark, underground, and never bother your head about it again except to watch the beauty and vitality of the flowers and grains that spring from the earth it has fertilized."

Neale as he held the lifted match over his pipe, shook his head. That was all very well, put picturesquely as Marise always put things; but you couldn't knock an idea on the head just with an apt metaphor. There was a great deal more to be said about it, even if fool half-baked faddists like Eugenia did make it ridiculous. In the first place it was nothing so new. Everybody who had ever encountered a crisis in his life and conquered it, had . . . why, he himself . . .

He felt his heart beat faster, and before he knew what was coming, he felt a great, heart-quickening gust of fresh salt air blow over him, and felt himself far from the book-tainted stagnant air of that indoor room. He forgot to light his pipe and sat motionless, holding the burning match till it flared up at the end and scorched his fingers. Then he dropped it with a startled oath, and looked quickly around him.

In that instant he had lived over again the moment in Nova Scotia when he had gone down to the harbor just as the battered little tramp steamer was pulling out, bound for China.

Good God! What an astonishing onslaught that had been! How from some great, fierce, unguessed appetite, the longing for wandering, lawless freedom had burst up! Marise, the children, their safe, snug middle-class life, how they had seemed only so many drag-anchors to cut himself loose from and make out to the open sea! If the steamer had been still close enough to the dock so that he could have jumped aboard, how he would have leaped! He might have been one of those men who disappeared mysteriously, from out a prosperous and happy life, and are never heard of again. But it hadn't been close enough. The green oily water widened between them; and he had gone back with a burning heart to that deadly little country hotel.

Well, had he buried it and forced himself to think no more about it? No. Not on your life he hadn't. He'd stood up to himself. He'd asked himself what the hell was the matter, and he'd gone after it, as any grown man would. It hadn't been fun. He remembered that the sweat had run down his face as though he'd been handling planks in the lumber-yard in midsummer.

And what had he found? He'd found that he'd never got over the jolt it had given him, there on that aimless youthful trip through Italy, with China and the Eastern seas before him, to fall in love and have all those plans for wandering cut off by the need for a safe, stable life.

Then he'd gone on. He'd asked himself, if that's so, then what? He hadn't pulled any of the moralizing stern-duty stuff; he knew Marise would rather die than have him doing for her something he hated, out of stern duty. It was an insult, anyhow, unless it was a positively helpless cripple in question, to do things for people out of duty only. And to mix what folks called "duty" up with love, that was the devil. So he hadn't.

That was the sort of thing Marise had meant, so long ago, when they were first engaged, that was the sort of thing she had asked him never to do. He'd promised he never would, and this wasn't the first time the promise had held him straight to what was, after all, the only decent course with a woman like Marise, as strong as she was fine. Anything else would be treating her like a child, or a dependent, as he'd hate to have her treat him, or anybody treat him.

So this time he'd asked himself right out, what he really wanted and needed in life, and he'd been ready, honestly ready, to take any answer he got, and dree his weird accordingly, as the best thing for everybody concerned, as the only honest thing, as the only thing that would put any bed-rock under him, as what Marise would want him to do. If it meant tramp-steamers, why it had to be tramp-steamers. Something could be managed for Marise and the children.

This was what he had asked. And what answer had he got? Why, of course, he hankered for the double-jointed, lawless freedom that the tramp-steamer stood for. He guessed everybody wanted that, more or less. But he wanted Marise and the children a damn sight more. And not only Marise and the children. He hadn't let himself lay it all on their backs, and play the martyr's rôle of the forcibly domesticated wild male. No, he wanted the life he had, outside the family, his own line of work; he wanted the sureness of it, the coherence of it, the permanence of it, the clear conscience he had about what he was doing in the world, the knowledge that he was creating something, helping men to use the natural resources of the world without exploiting either the natural resources or the men; he wanted the sense of deserved power over other human beings. That was what he really wanted most of all. You could call it smug and safe and bourgeois if you liked. But the plain fact remained that it had more of what really counted for him than any other life he could see possible. And when he looked at it, hard, with his eyes open, why the tramp-steamer to China sailed out of school-boy theatrical clouds and showed herself for the shabby, sordid little substitute for a real life she would have been to him.

He'd have liked to have that too, of course. You'd like to have everything! But you can't. And it is only immature boys who whimper because you can't have your cake and eat it too. That was all there was to that.

What he had dug for was to find his deepest and most permanent desires, and when he had found them, he'd come home with a happy heart.

It even seemed to him that he had been happier and quieter than before. Well, maybe Marise's metaphor had something in it, for all it was so flowery and high-falutin. Maybe she would say that what he had done was exactly what she'd described, to dig it under the ground and let it fertilize and enrich his life.

Oh Lord! how a figure of speech always wound you up in knots if you tried to use it to say anything definite!

He relighted his pipe, this time with a steady hand, and a cool eye; and turned to Trevelyan and Garibaldi again. He'd take that other side of himself out in books, he guessed.

He had now arrived at the crucial moment of the battle, and lifted his head and his heart in anticipation of the way Garibaldi met that moment. He read, "To experienced eyes the battle seemed lost. Bixio said to Garibaldi, 'General, I fear we ought to retreat.' Garibaldi looked up as though a serpent had stung him. 'Here we make Italy or die!' he said."

"That's the talk!" cried Neale, to himself. The brave words resounded in the air about him, and drowned out the voices from the next room.