She sank back to a sitting position, drawing a long breath, mopping her forehead with her sleeve, as unconscious of her looks before Neale as though she had still been alone.  She motioned him down beside her.  “Oh, Neale, I’m so glad!  How’d you happen to be so early?  Maybe if we stay right out here, where the children won’t know where we are, we can have a few minutes quite to ourselves.  Toucle is going to get tea tonight.  Neale, sit down a minute.  I want to tell you something.  I’m awfully upset.  I went over to help Mr. Welles transplant his Brussels sprouts, and we got to talking.  Neale, what do you suppose has been in his mind all this time we’ve been thinking him so happy and contented here?”

“Doesn’t he like Crittenden’s?  Find it dull?”

“No, no, not that, a bit.  He loves it.  It’s heart-breaking to see how much he loves it!” She stopped, her voice shaking a little, and waited till she could get it under control.  Her husband took her stained, dusty hand in his.  She gave his fingers a little pressure, absently, not noting what she did, and seeing the corner of his handkerchief showing in the pocket of his shirt, she pulled it out with a nervous jerk, and wiped her face all over with it.

He waited in silence.

“Listen, Neale, I know it will sound perfectly crazy to you, at first.  But you might as well believe it, for he is serious.  It seems he’s been getting lots more letters from that niece or cousin of his, down in Georgia.  She tells him about things, how the Negroes are treated, all the Jim Crow business carried into every single detail of every single minute of every single day.  It seems they’re not badly treated as long as they’ll stay day-laborers or servants, but . . . oh well, there’s no need to go on with telling you . . . you know.  We all know well enough what the American attitude is.  Only I didn’t think it could be so bad, or so everlastingly kept up every minute, as this cousin tells him.  I suppose she ought to know.  She’s lived there for forty years.  She keeps citing instances she’s seen.”  Marise broke out with a fierce, blaming sharpness, “I don’t see what business she had, writing him that way.  I think it was beastly of her.  Why couldn’t she let him alone!”

She felt her husband waiting patiently for her to quiet down and go on more coherently, and knew that his patience came from a long acquaintance with her mental habits, a certainty that her outbursts of feeling generally did quiet down if one waited:  and across her genuine absorption in the story she was telling there flitted, bat-like, a distaste far being known so well as all that!  There was something indiscreet and belittling in it, she thought, with an inward fastidious recoil.  But this had gone, entirely, in a moment, and she was rushing on, “And, Neale, what do you think?  She has worked on him, and he has worked on himself till he’s got himself in a morbid state.  He thinks perhaps he ought to leave Ashley that he loves so much and go down to live where this horrid cousin lives. . . .”