And now another question crowded forward, darkly confused, charged with a thousand complex associations and emotions.  There had been something displeasing and preposterous in the idea of trying to stoop her grown stature and simplify her complex tastes and adult interests back into the narrow limits of a child’s toy-house.  Could it be that she felt something of the same displeasure when she set herself fully to conceive what it would be to cramp herself and her complex interests and adult affections back to . . .

But at this there came a wild protesting clamor, bursting out to prevent her from completing this thought; loud, urgent voices, men’s, women’s, with that desperate certainty of their ground which always struck down any guard Marise had been able to put up.  They cried her down as a traitor to the fullness of life, those voices, shouting her down with all the unquestioned authority she had encountered so many times on that terribly vital thing, the printed page; they clashed in their fury and all but drowned each other out.  Only disconnected words reached her, but she recognized the well-known sentences from which they came . . . “puritanism . . . abundance of personality . . . freedom of development . . . nothing else vital in human existence . . . prudishness . . . conventionality . . . our only possible contact with the life-purpose . . . with the end of passion life declines and dies.”

The first onslaught took Marise’s breath, as though a literal storm had burst around her.  She was shaken as she had been shaken so many times before.  She lost her hold on her staff . . . what had that staff been?

At the thought, the master-words came to her mind again; and all fell quiet and in a great hush waited on her advance.  Neale had said, “What is deepest and most living in you.”  Well, what was deepest and most living in her?  That was what she was trying to find out.  That was what those voices were trying to cry her down from finding.

For the first time in all her life, she drew an inspiration from Neale’s resistance to opposition, knew something of the joy of battle.  What right had those people to cry her down?  She would not submit to it.

She would go back to the place where she had been set upon by other people’s voices, other people’s thoughts, and she would go on steadily, thinking her own.

She had been thinking that there was the same displeasure and distaste as when she had thought of returning to her literal childhood, when she set herself fully to conceive what it would be to cramp herself and simplify her complex interests and affections back to the narrow limits of passion, which like her play with dolls had been only a foreshadowing of something greater to come.