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

CHAPTER XII

HEARD FROM THE STUDY

June 20.

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.