He looked at her, his attentive, intelligent look, and let his arm drop.  And yet, although he was serious now, she was sure that he saw only that the subject agitated her, and did not see any possibility that it might touch them both, personally.

“I have to think whatever I’m convinced is true, whether it makes me miserable or not, don’t I?” he said gently.  “And it does make me miserable, of course.  Who can help being miserable at the spectacle of such rich possibilities as human life is full of, mismanaged and spoiled and lost?”

“But, Neale, do you realize that people are thinking, books are being written to prove that parents’ love for their children is only self-love, hypocritically disguised, and sometimes even sexual love camouflaged; and that anybody is better for the children to be with than their mother; and that married people, after the first flare-up of passion is over, hate each other instead of loving?”

“I daresay there’s a certain amount of truth in that, occasionally.  It would certainly explain some of the inexplicable things we all see happen in family life,” he remarked.

Marise started and cried out piercingly, “Neale, how can you say such things to me!”

He looked at her keenly again, keenly and penetratingly, and said, “I’m not one of those who think it inherent in the nature of women to take abstract propositions personally always.  But I do think they will have to make a big effort to get themselves out of a mighty old acquired habit of thinking every general observation is directed at them personally.”

She flashed out indignantly at him, “How can you help taking it personally when it shakes the very foundations of our life?”

He was astonished enough at this to suit even her.  His face showed the most genuine amazed incapacity to understand her.  “Shakes the . . . why, Marise dear, what are you talking about?  You don’t have to believe about yourself all the generalizing guesses that people are writing down in books, do you, if it contradicts your own experience?  Just because you read that lots of American men had flat-foot and were refused at the recruiting station for that, you don’t have to think your own feet flat, do you?  If you do think so, all you have to do is to start out and walk on them, to know for sure they’re all right.  Heavens and earth!  People of our age, who have really lived, don’t need somebody in a book to tell them what’s happening to them.  Don’t you know whether you really love Elly and Mark and Paul?  If you don’t, I should think a few minutes’ thought and recollection of the last ten years would tell you, all right.  Don’t you know whether we hate each other, you and I?”

Marise drew a long breath of relief.  This was the sort of talk she wanted.  She clutched at the strong hand which seemed at last held out to her.  She did so want to be talked out of it all.  “Oh good! then, Neale, you don’t believe any of that sort of talk?  You were only saying so for argument.”