He withdrew the hand.  “Yes, I do believe a good deal of as a general proposition.  What I’m saying, what I’m always saying, dear, and trying my best to live, is that everybody must decide for himself when a general proposition applies to him, what to believe about his own life and its values.  Nobody else can tell him.”

She approached along another line.  “But, Neale, that’s all very well for you, because you have so much withstandingness in you.  But for me, there are things so sacred, so intimate, so much a part of me, that only to have some rough hand laid on them, to have them pulled out and pawed over and thought about . . . it frightens me so, sets me in such a quiver!  And they don’t seem the same again. Aren’t there things in life so high and delicate that they can’t stand questioning?”

He considered this a long time, visibly putting all his intelligence on it.  “I can’t say, for you,” he finally brought out.  “You’re so much finer and more sensitive than I. But I’ve never in all these years seen that your fineness and your sensitiveness make you any less strong in the last analysis.  You suffer more, respond more to all the implications of things; but I don’t see that there is any reason to think there’s any inherent weakness in you that need make you afraid to look at facts.”

He presented this testimony to her, seriously, gravely.  It took her breath, coming from him.  She could only look at him in speechless gratitude and swallow hard.  Finally she said, falteringly, “You’re too good, Neale, to say that.  I don’t deserve it.  I’m awfully weak, many times.”

“I wouldn’t say it, if it weren’t so,” he answered, “and I didn’t say you weren’t weak sometimes.  I said you were strong when all was said and done.”

Even in her emotion, she had an instant’s inward smile at the Neale-like quality of this.  She went on, “But don’t you think there is such a thing as spoiling beautiful elements in life, with handling them, questioning them, for natures that aren’t naturally belligerent and ready to fight for what they want to keep?  For instance, when somebody says that children in a marriage are like drift-wood left high on the rocks of a dwindled stream, tokens of a flood-time of passion now gone by. . . .”  She did not tell him who had said this.  Nor did he ask.  But she thought by his expression that he knew it had been Vincent Marsh.

He said heartily, “I should just call that a nasty-minded remark from somebody who didn’t know what he was talking about.  And let it go at that.”

“There, you see,” she told him, “that rouses your instinct to resist, to fight back.  But it doesn’t mine.  It just makes me sick.”