She sat down on the floor and, lifting the candle, looked in at the yellowed old playthings, the flimsy, spineless paper-dolls, the faded silk rags, the discolored bits of papers, the misshapen staggering paste-board chairs and bed, which had seemed so delightful and enchanting to her then, far better than any actual room she knew.  A homesickness for the past came over her.  It was not only Margaret who was dead.  The other little girl who had played there, who had hung so lovingly over this creation of her fancy, was dead too, Marise thought with a backward look of longing.

And then the honest, unsparing habit of her life with Neale shook her roughly.  This was sentimentalizing.  If she could, would she give up what she had now and go back to being the little girl, deeply satisfied with make-shift toys, which were only the foreshadowings of what was to come?  If she could, would she exchange her actual room at home, for this, even to have again all the unquestioning trust in everyone and everything of the child who had died in her heart?  Would she choose to give up the home where her living children had been born, at no matter what cost of horrid pain to herself, and were growing up to no matter what dark uncertainties in life, for this toy inhabited by paper-dolls?  No, no, she had gone on, gone on, and left this behind.  Nor would she, if she could, exchange the darker, heavier, richer gifts for the bright small trinkets of the past.

All this ran fluently from her mind, with a swiftness and clarity which seemed as shallow as it was rapid; but now there sounded in her ears a warning roar of deeper waters to which this was carrying her.

Before she knew what was coming, she braced herself to meet it; and holding hard and ineffectually, felt herself helplessly swept out and flung to the fury of the waves . . . and she met them with an answering tumult of welcome.  That was what Vincent Marsh could do for her, wanted to do for her,—­that wonderful, miraculous thing,—­give back to her something she had thought she had left behind forever; he could take her, in the strength of her maturity with all the richness of growth, and carry her back to live over again the fierce, concentrated intensity of newly-born passion which had come into her life, and gone, before she had had the capacity to understand or wholly feel it.  He could lift her from the dulled routine of life beginning to fade and lose its colors, and carry her back to the glorious forgetfulness of every created thing, save one man and one woman.

She had had a glimpse of that, in the first year of her married life, had had it, and little by little had lost it.  It had crumbled away insensibly, between her fingers, with use, with familiarity, with the hateful blunting of sensitiveness which life’s battering always brings.  But she could have it again; with a grown woman’s strength and depth of feeling, she could have the inheritance of youth.  She had spent it, but now she could have it again.  That was what Vincent meant.