How strange an experience for her altogether, to be able to stand firm against noise and urgent clamor and confusion, and to see, in spite of it, what she was looking at; to see, back of the powerful magnetic personality, the undeveloped and tyrannical soul, the cramped mind without experience or conception of breadth and freedom in the relations between human beings; to be able to hear Vincent cry out on her with that fierce, masterful certainty of himself, that she was acting from cowed and traditional-minded motives and not to believe a word of it, because it was not true; not even to feel the scared throb of alarm at the very idea that it might be true; to have it make no impression on her save pity that Vincent should be imprisoned in a feeling of which possession was so great a part that failure to possess turned all the rest to poison and sickness.

What had happened to her, in truth, that she had this new steadfastness?  She had told Vincent he could not understand it.  Did she understand it herself?  She leaned her chin on her two hands looking deep into the green recesses of the forest.  High above her head, a wind swayed the tops of the pines and sang loudly; but down between the great brown columns of their trunks, not a breath stirred.  The thick-set, myriad-leaved young maples held all their complicated delicately-edged foliage motionless in perfect calm.

It was very still in the depths of Marise’s complicated mind also, although the wind stirred the surface.  Yes, she knew what had happened to her.  She had seen it completely happen to three other human beings, miraculously, unbelievably, certainly; had seen the babies who could not tell light from dark, heat from cold, emerge by the mere process of healthful living into keenly sensitive beings accurately alive to every minutest variation of the visible world.  It must be that like them she had simply learned to tell moral light from dark, heat from cold, by the mere process of healthful living.  What happened to the child who at one time could not grasp the multiplication table, and a few years later, if only he were properly fed and cared for, had somehow so wholly changed, although still the same, that he found his way lightly among geometric conceptions, and only a few years after that was probing with expert fingers at some unsolved problem of astronomy?  He had grown up, that was all.  By calling the miracle a familiar name we veiled the marvel of it.  Insensibly to him, with no visible change from one day to the next, he had acquired a totally different conception of the universe, a totally different valuation of everything in life.

That was what had happened to her.  She had grown up . . . why should not a woman grow up to other valuations of things as well as her comrade in life?