“Oh, it’s possible enough, I suppose,” admitted Neale.  “But she seems perfectly contented, and thinks the world of the children.”

Marise’s face clouded.  The phrase had recalled her dark preoccupations of a moment ago.  “Lots of people nowadays would say she seems to be fond of the children because she is using them to fill up a lack in her life,” she said somberly; “that ’Gene no longer satisfied her, and that she fed on the children because she was starving emotionally.”  Her husband making no comment on this, she went on, “Neale, don’t you think that people are saying horrid, distressing things nowadays?  About marriage I mean, and all relations between men and women and between parents and children?” Her heart was beating faster as she finished this question.  The subject was broached at last.  Where would it lead them?  Where would it lead them?  She shut her eyes at the thought.

“There’s a good deal to be said about all that, that’s pretty horrid and perfectly true,” remarked Neale casually.  He tilted his hat further over his eyes and leaned back, propping himself on one elbow.

“Neale!” she protested, shocked and repelled.  She had hoped for something very different from Neale.  But she thought, in a momentary exasperation with him, she might have known she would not get it.  He always took everything so abstractedly, so impersonally.

“I don’t see any use in pretending there’s not,” he advanced with a reasonable, considering air.  “I don’t see that intimate human relationships are in any more of a mess than other human relations.  International ones, for instance, just now.  But they certainly are in considerable of a mess, in a great many cases.  It is evident that lots of times they’re managed all wrong.”

Marise was so acutely disappointed that she felt a quavering ache in her throat, and kept silence for a moment.  So this was what she had looked forward to, as a help.  What was Neale there for, if not for her to lean against, to protect her, to be a defending wall about her?  He was so strong and so clearheaded, he could be such a wall if he chose.  How stern and hard he was, the core of him!

“Neale,” she said after a moment, “I wonder if you even know what things are being said about what we’ve always believed in . . . motherhood for instance, and marriage?”

She had been unable to keep the quaver out of her voice, and at the sound of it, he sat up instantly, astonished, solicitous, tender.  “Why, darling, what’s the matter?” he said again, moving closer to her, bending over her.

“How can you think such things without their making you perfectly miserable, without making you want to go straight and cut your throat?” she cried out on his callousness.

He put his arm about her again, not absently this time, and drew her close.  She thought angrily, “He thinks it’s just a fit of nerves I can be soothed out of like a child,” and pulled away from him.