MARISE’S COMING-OF-AGE

July 23. Dawn

Even after the old child, Agnes, had been soothed and reassured, over and over, till she had fallen asleep, and the house lay profoundly quiet, Marise felt not the slightest approach of drowsiness or even of fatigue. She lay down on her bed, but could not close her eyes. They remained wide open, looking not at a wild confusion of incoherent images as they had the night before, but straight into blackness and vacancy.

It was strange how from the brawling turmoil of impressions which had shouted and cried out to her the night before, and had wrought her to frenzy by their insane insistence, not an echo reached her now. Her mind was as silent and intent as the old house, keeping its last mute watch over its mistress. Intent on what? She did not know. On something that was waiting for her, on something for which she was waiting.

In an immense hush, like the dusky silence in a cathedral aisle or in the dark heart of the woods, there was something there waiting for her to go and find it.

That hush had fallen on her at the sight of Neale’s face, at the sound of his voice, as he had looked at her and spoken to her, at the last, just before he went away back to the children. Those furiously racing pulses of hers had been stilled by it into this steady rhythm which now beat quietly through her. The clashing thoughts which had risen with malevolent swiftness, like high, battling shadowy genii, and had torn her in pieces as they fought back and forth, were stilled as though a master-word had been spoken which they must all obey.

The old house, silent under the stars, lay quiet in its vigil about her, but slept no more than she; the old house which had been a part of her childhood and her youth now watched over her entry into another part of her journey.

For as she lay there, wide-awake, watching the light of the candle, she felt that she knew what was waiting for her, what she must go to find. It was her maturity.

And as she lay quiet, her ears ringing in the solemn hush which Neale’s look and voice had laid about her, she felt slowly coming into her, like a tide from a great ocean, the strength to go forward. She lay still, watching the candle-flame, hovering above the wick which tied it to the candle, reaching up, reaching up, never for a moment flagging in that transmutation of the dead matter below it, into something shining and alive.

She felt the quiet strength come into her like a tide. And presently, as naturally as a child wakes in the morning, refreshed, and feels the impulse to rise to active effort again, she sat up in bed, folded her arms around her knees, and began to think.

Really to think this time, not merely to be the helpless battle-field over which hurtling projectiles of fierce emotions passed back and forth! She set her life fairly there before her, and began to try to understand it.

As she took this first step and saw the long journey stretching out before her, she knew on what staff she leaned. It was Neale’s belief that she was strong and not weak, that she could find out, if she tried, what was deepest and most living in her heart. With this in her hand, with that great protecting hush about her, she set forth. She was afraid of what she might find, but she set forth.

She must begin at the beginning this time, and go steadily forward from one step to the next, not her usual involuntary plunge, not the usual closing over her head of those yelling waters of too vivid impression.

The beginning had been . . . yes, the first conscious beginning had been the going away of little Mark, out of his babyhood into his own child-life. He had gone out and left an empty place behind him, which till then had been filled with the insistent ever-present need for care for the physical weakness of babyhood. And she had known that never again would Mark fill that place.

Emptiness, silence, solitude in the place of constant activity; it had frightened her, had set before her a vision that her life had reached its peak, and henceforth would go down the decline. Into that empty place had come a ringing, peremptory call back to personal and physical youth and excitement and burning sensations. And with that blinding rebirth of physical youth had come a doubt of all that had seemed the recompense for the loss of it, had come the conception that she might be letting herself be fooled and tricked out of the only real things.

There had been many parts to this: her revolt from the mere physical drudgery of her life, from giving so much of her strength to the dull, unsavory, material things. This summer, a thousand times in a thousand ways, there had been brought home to her by Vincent, by Eugenia, the fact that there were lives so arranged that other people did all the drudgery, and left one free to perceive nothing but the beauty and delicacy of existence. Now, straight at it! With all the knowledge of herself and of life which she had gathered, straight at it, to see what this meant! Did their entire freedom from drudgery give them a keener sense of the beauty and delicacy of existence? Were they more deeply alive because of the ease of their lives?

She cast about her for evidence, in a firm, orderly search among the materials which life had brought to her. Had she seen anything which could give evidence on that? There was Eugenia; Eugenia and her friends had always lived that life of rich possessions and well-served ease. What had it made of them? Was their sense of beauty deeper and more living because of it? No, not in the least.

She turned her inward eye on Eugenia’s life, on the lives of the people in that circle, in a long searching gaze. Was it deep in eternal values? Was it made up of a constant recurrence of sensitive aliveness to what is most worth responding to? Odd, that it did not seem to be! They were petulant, and bored, and troubled about minute flaws in their ease, far more than they were deep in communion with beauty.

Another piece of evidence came knocking at the door now, a picture of quaint and humble homeliness . . . herself standing before the stove with the roast on a plate, and little Mark saying fastidiously, “Oh, how nasty raw meat looks!” She recalled her passing impatience with the childishness of that comment, her passing sense of the puerile ignorance of the inherent unity of things, in such an attitude of eagerness to feed on results and unwillingness to take one’s share of what leads up to results. Yes, it was more there, than in looking at Eugenia, that she could find evidence. Did she want to be of those who sat afar off and were served with the fine and delicate food of life, and knew nothing of the unsavory process of preparing it? It had seemed to her this summer, a thousand times with Vincent’s eyes on her, scornful of her present life, that she did want it, that she wanted that more than anything else. Now let her look full at it. She was a grown woman now, who could foresee what it would mean.

She looked full at it, set herself there in her imagination, in the remote ivory tower and looked out from its carven windows at the rough world where she had lived and worked, and from which she would henceforth be protected . . . and shut out. She looked long, and in the profound silence, both within and without her, she listened to the deepest of the voices in her heart.

And she knew that it was too late for that. She had lived, and she could not blot out what life had brought to her. She could never now, with a tranquil heart, go into the ivory tower. It would do her no good to shut and bar the golden door a hundred times behind her, because she would have with her, everywhere she went, wrought into the very fiber of her being, a guilty sense of all the effort and daily strain and struggle in which she did not share.

She saw no material good accomplished by taking her share. The existence in the world of so much drudgery and unlovely slavery to material processes was an insoluble mystery; but a life in which her part of it would be taken by other people and added to their own burdens . . . no, she had grown into something which could not endure that!

Perhaps this was one of the hard, unwelcome lessons that the war had brought to her. She remembered how she had hated the simple comforts of home, the safety, the roof over her head, because they were being paid for by such hideous sufferings on the part of others; how she had been ashamed to lie down in her warm bed when she thought of Neale and his comrades in the trench-mud, in the cold horror of the long drenching nights, awaiting the attack; and she had turned sick to see the long trains of soldiers going out while she stayed safely behind and bore no part in the wretchedness which war is. There had been no way for her to take her part in that heavy payment for her safety and comfort; but the bitterness of those days had shocked her imagination alive to the shame of sharing and enjoying what she had not helped to pay for, to the disharmony of having more than your share while other people have less than theirs.

This was nothing she had consciously sought for. She felt no dutiful welcome that it had come; she bent under it as under a burden. But it was there. Life had made her into one of the human beings capable of feeling that responsibility, each for all, and the war had driven it home, deep into her heart, whence she could not pluck it out.

She might never have known it, never have thought of it, if she had been safely protected by ignorance of what life is like. But now she knew, living had taught her; and that knowledge was irrevocably part of the woman she had become.

Wait now! Was this only habit, routine, dulled lack of divining imagination of what another life could be? That was the challenge Vincent would throw down. She gazed steadily at the wall before her, and called up, detail by detail, the life which Vincent Marsh thought the only one that meant richness and abundance for the human spirit. It hung there, a shimmering mass of lovely colors and exquisite textures and fineness and delicacy and beauty. And as she looked at it, it took on the shape of a glorious, uprooted plant, cut off from the very source of life, its glossy surfaces already beginning to wither and dull in the sure approach of corruption and decay. But what beauties were there to pluck, lovely fading beauties, poignant and exquisite sensations, which she was capable of savoring, which she sadly knew she would live and die without having known, a heritage into which she would never enter; because she had known the unforgettable taste of the other heritage, alive and rooted deep!

This faded out and left her staring at the blank wall again, feeling old and stern.

Nothing more came for a moment, and restless, feeling no bodily fatigue at all, she got out of her bed, took up the candle, and stepped aimlessly out into the hall. The old clock at the end struck a muffled stroke, as if to greet her. She held up her candle to look at it. Half-past two in the morning. A long time till dawn would come.

She hesitated a moment and turned towards the door of a garret room which stood open. She had not been in there for so long, years perhaps; but as a child she had often played there among the old things, come down from the dead, who were kept in such friendly recollection in this house. Near the door there had been an old, flat-topped, hair-covered trunk . . . yes, here it was, just as it had been. Nothing ever changed here. She sat down on it, the candle on the floor beside her, and saw herself as a little girl playing among the old things.

A little girl! And now she was the mother of a little girl. So short a time had passed! She understood so very little more than when she had been the little girl herself. Yet now there was Elly who came and stood by her, and looked at her, and asked with all her eyes and lips and being, “Mother, what is the meaning of life?”

What answer had she to give? Was she at all more fit than anyone else to try to give Elly the unknowable answer to that dark question? Was there any deep spiritual reality which counted at all, which one human being could give to another? Did we really live on desert islands, cut off so wholly from each other by the unplumbed, salt, estranging sea? And if we did, why break one’s heart in the vain effort to do the impossible, to get from human beings what they could not give?

Her heart ached in an old bitterness at the doubt. Did her children . . . could they . . . give her the love she wanted from them, in answer to her gift of her life to them? They were already beginning to go away from her, to be estranged from her, to shut her out of their lives, to live their lives with no place for her in them.

She sat there on the old trunk and saw the endless procession of parents and children passing before her, the children so soon parents, all driven forward by what they could not understand, yearning and starving for what was not given them, all wrapped and dimmed in the twilight of their doubt and ignorance. Where were they going? And why? So many of them, so many!

Her humbled spirit was prostrate before their mystery, before the vastness of the whole, of which she and her children were only a part, a tiny, lowly part.

With this humbling sense of the greatness of the whole, something swollen and sore in her heart gave over its aching, as though a quieting hand had been laid on it. She drew a long breath. Oh, from what did it come, this rest from that sore bitterness?

It came from this, that she had somehow been shown that what she wanted was not love from her children for herself. That was trying to drive a bargain to make them pay for something they had never asked to have. What she wanted was not to get love, to get a place in their lives for herself, to get anything from them, but to give them all that lay in her to give. If that was what she wanted, why, nothing, nothing could take it away. And it was truly . . . in this hour of silence and searching . . . she saw that it was truly what she wanted. It was something in her which had grown insensibly to life and strength, during all those uncounted hours of humble service to the children. And it was something golden and immortal in her poor, flawed, human heart.

A warm bright wave of feeling swept over her . . . there, distinct and rounded against the shadowy confused procession of abstract ideas about parents and children, there stood looking at her out of their clear loving eyes, Paul and Elly and little Mark, alive, there, a part of her; not only themselves but her children; not only her children but themselves; human life which she and Neale had created out of the stuff of the universe. They looked at her and in their regard was the clear distillation of the innumerable past hours when they had looked at her with love and trust.

At the sight of them, her own children, her heart swelled and opened wide to a conception of something greater and deeper in motherhood than she had had; but which she could have if she could deserve it; something so wide and sun-flooded that the old selfish, possessive, never-satisfied ache which had called itself love withered away, its power to hurt and poison her gone.

She had no words for this . . . she could not even try to understand it. It was as solemn a birth-hour to her, as the hour when she had first heard the cry of her new-born babies . . . she was one mother then, she had become another mother now. She turned to bless the torment of bitter, doubting questioning of what she had called mother-love, which had forced her forward blindly struggling, till she found this divination of a greater possibility.

She had been trying to span the unfathomable with a mean and grasping desire. Now she knew what she must try to do; to give up the lesser and receive the greater.

This passed and left her, looking straight before her at the flickering shadows, leaping among the dusky corners of the dark slant-ceilinged room. The old clock struck three in the hall behind her.

She felt tired now, as she had after the other travail which had given her her children, and leaned her head on her hand. Where did she herself, her own personal self come in, with all this? It was always a call to more effort which came. To get the great good things of life how much you had to give! How much of what seemed dearly yourself, you had to leave behind as you went forward! Her childhood was startlingly called up by this old garret, where nothing had changed: she could still see herself, running about there, happily absorbed in the vital trivialities of her ten years. She had not forgotten them, she knew exactly the thrill felt by that shadowy little girl as she leaned over the old chest yonder, and pulled out the deep-fringed shawl and quilted petticoat.

It had been sweet to be a little girl, she thought wistfully, to have had no past, to know only the shining present of every day with no ominous, difficult future beyond it. Ineffably sweet too was the aroma of perfect trust in the strength and wisdom of grown-up people, which tinctured deep with certainty every profoundest layer of her consciousness. Ineffably sweet . . . and lost forever. There was no human being in the world as wise and strong as poor old Cousin Hetty had seemed to her then. A kingdom of security from which she was now shut out.

And the games, the fantastic plays, how whole and rounded and entire, the pleasure in them! She remembered the rainy day she had played paper-dolls here once, with little Margaret Congdon . . . dead, years ago, that much-loved playmate of past summer days . . . and how they had taken the chest for the house for Margaret’s dolls, and the hair-trunk where she sat, for hers; how they had arranged them with the smallest of playthings, with paste-board furniture, and bits of colored tissue paper for rugs, and pieces of silk and linen from the rag-bag for bed-clothes; how they had hummed and whistled to themselves as they worked (she could hear them now!); and how the aromatic woodsy smell of the unfinished old room and the drone of the rain on the roof had been a part of their deep content.

Nothing had changed in that room, except the woman who sat there.

She got up with a sudden impulse, and threw back the lid of the trunk. A faint musty odor rose from it, as though it had been shut up for very long. And . . . why, there it was, the doll’s room, just as they had left it, how long ago! How like this house! How like Cousin Hetty never to have touched it!

She sat down on the floor and, lifting the candle, looked in at the yellowed old playthings, the flimsy, spineless paper-dolls, the faded silk rags, the discolored bits of papers, the misshapen staggering paste-board chairs and bed, which had seemed so delightful and enchanting to her then, far better than any actual room she knew. A homesickness for the past came over her. It was not only Margaret who was dead. The other little girl who had played there, who had hung so lovingly over this creation of her fancy, was dead too, Marise thought with a backward look of longing.

And then the honest, unsparing habit of her life with Neale shook her roughly. This was sentimentalizing. If she could, would she give up what she had now and go back to being the little girl, deeply satisfied with make-shift toys, which were only the foreshadowings of what was to come? If she could, would she exchange her actual room at home, for this, even to have again all the unquestioning trust in everyone and everything of the child who had died in her heart? Would she choose to give up the home where her living children had been born, at no matter what cost of horrid pain to herself, and were growing up to no matter what dark uncertainties in life, for this toy inhabited by paper-dolls? No, no, she had gone on, gone on, and left this behind. Nor would she, if she could, exchange the darker, heavier, richer gifts for the bright small trinkets of the past.

All this ran fluently from her mind, with a swiftness and clarity which seemed as shallow as it was rapid; but now there sounded in her ears a warning roar of deeper waters to which this was carrying her.

Before she knew what was coming, she braced herself to meet it; and holding hard and ineffectually, felt herself helplessly swept out and flung to the fury of the waves . . . and she met them with an answering tumult of welcome. That was what Vincent Marsh could do for her, wanted to do for her, that wonderful, miraculous thing, give back to her something she had thought she had left behind forever; he could take her, in the strength of her maturity with all the richness of growth, and carry her back to live over again the fierce, concentrated intensity of newly-born passion which had come into her life, and gone, before she had had the capacity to understand or wholly feel it. He could lift her from the dulled routine of life beginning to fade and lose its colors, and carry her back to the glorious forgetfulness of every created thing, save one man and one woman.

She had had a glimpse of that, in the first year of her married life, had had it, and little by little had lost it. It had crumbled away insensibly, between her fingers, with use, with familiarity, with the hateful blunting of sensitiveness which life’s battering always brings. But she could have it again; with a grown woman’s strength and depth of feeling, she could have the inheritance of youth. She had spent it, but now she could have it again. That was what Vincent meant.

He seemed to lean over her now, his burning, quivering hand on hers. She felt a deep hot flush rise to her face, all over her body. She was like a crimson rose, offering the splendor of its maturity to be plucked. Let her have the courage to know that its end and aim and fulfilment lay in being plucked and gloriously worn before the coming of the inevitable end! Thus and thus only could one find certainty, before death came, of having lived as deeply as lay in one to live.

Through the glowing pride and defiance with which she felt herself rise to the challenge, felt herself strong to break and surmount all obstacles within and without, which stood in the way of that fulfilment of her complete self, she had heard . . . the slightest of trivialities . . . a thought gone as soon as it was conceived . . . nothing of the slightest consequence . . . harmless . . . insignificant . . . yet why should it give off the betraying clink of something flawed and cracked? . . . She had heard . . . it must have come from some corner of her own mind . . . something like this, “Set such an alternative between routine, traditional, narrow domestic life, and the mightiness and richness of mature passion, before a modern, free European woman, and see how quickly she would grasp with all her soul for passion.”

What was there about this, the veriest flying mote among a thousand others in the air, so to awaken in Marise’s heart a deep vibration of alarm? Why should she not have said that? she asked herself, angry and scared. Why was it not a natural thought to have had? She felt herself menaced by an unexpected enemy, and flew to arms.

Into the rich, hot, perfumed shrine which Vincent’s remembered words and look had built there about her, there blew a thin cool breath from the outside, through some crack opened by that casual thought. Before she even knew from whence it came, Marise cried out on it, in a fury of resentment . . . and shivered in it.

With no apparent volition of her own, she felt something very strong within her raise a mighty head and look about, stirred to watchfulness and suspicion by that luckless phrase.

She recognized it . . . the habit of honesty of thought, not native to Marise’s heart, but planted there by her relation with Neale’s stark, plain integrity. Feeding unchecked on its own food, during the long years of her marriage it had grown insensibly stronger and stronger, till now, tyrant and master, with the irresistible strength of conscious power, it could quell with a look all the rest of her nature, rich in colored possibilities of seductive self-deceit, sweet illusions, lovely falsities.

She could no more stop its advance now, straight though it made its way over treasures she fain would keep, than she could stop the beating of her heart.

A ruthless question or two . . . “Why did you say that about what a modern, free European woman would do in your place? Are you trying to play up to some trumpery notion of a rôle to fill? And more than this, did you really mean in your heart an actual, living woman of another race, such as you knew in Europe; or did you mean somebody in an Italian, or a French, or a Scandinavian book?” Marise writhed against the indignity of this, protested fiercely, angrily against the incriminating imputation in it . . . and with the same breath admitted it true.

It was true. She was horrified and lost in grief and humiliation at the cheapened aspect of what had looked so rich before. Had there been in truth an element of such trashy copying of the conventional pose of revolt in what had seemed so rushingly spontaneous? Oh no, no . . . not that!

She turned away and away from the possibility that she had been partially living up to other people’s ideas, finding it intolerable; and was met again and again by the relentless thrust of that acquired honesty of thought which had worn such deep grooves in her mind in all these years of unbroken practice of it. “You are not somebody in a book, you are not a symbol of modern woman who must make the gestures appropriate for your part . . .” One by one, that relentless power seated in her many-colored tumultuous heart put out the flaring torches.

It had grown too strong for her, that habit of honesty of thought and action. If this struggle with it had come years before she could have mastered it, flinging against it the irresistible suppleness and lightness of her ignorant youth. But now, freighted heavily with experience of reality, she could not turn and bend quickly enough to escape it.

It had profited too well by all those honest years with Neale . . . never to have been weakened by a falsehood between them, by a shade of pretense of something more, or different from what really was there. 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 passion, fed by all the multitudinous 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 passion? 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 passed? When she had tried to tell herself that full-fruited passion 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-clustering, 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 associations 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 passion 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 passion, 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 sex. . . .

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 muffled 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.”