“I should say it depended on which parents and on which children were meant,” advanced Neale guardedly.

Marise had at first an affectionate smile for this, and then a laugh.  She got up from the piano-stool and went to kiss him.  He said with a whimsical suspicion of this, “Why so?”

“Because you are so entirely you,” she told him, and went back to Scriabine.

III

September 22.

It was the half-hour of pause after lunch.  The children played idly with the fox-terrier and lounged on the steps of the side-porch, strong and brown, living cups filled to the brim with life.  Neale had pushed his chair back from the table, lighted his pipe, and sat meditating.  Presently he put out his hand and laid it on Marise’s, who had turned to look down the sun-flooded valley.

It was high-noon, dreamy, entranced, all the world golden with the magnificent weather as a holly-hock is golden with pollen.  From the brook came the living voice of the water, with the special note of brave clarity it always had for brilliant noons.

It seemed to Marise that she too was all gold-powdered with the magnificence of life, that in her heart there sang a clear living voice that did not fear high-noons.

IV

October.

Would Vincent come back at all?  Marise had wondered so often.  Not Vincent in the flesh; that last angry bewildered gesture had finality in it.  He had given her up then, totally.  But would he come back to haunt her in those inevitable moments of flat ebb-tide in life, when what should be moist and living, withered and crisped in the merciless drought of drudgery and routine?  She feared it, frankly dreaded it at first, and tried to think how to brace herself against it.  But it was not then that tie came, not when she was toiling with dishes to wash, or vegetables to pare, or the endless care of the children’s never-in-order clothes.  Instead she found in those moments, which had been arid before, a curious new savor, a salt without which life would seem insipid, something which gave her appetite for the rest.  “This is all Tolstoyan nonsense and sentimentality,” she told herself mockingly, “there is nothing sacred about scrubbing the floor.”  Or on another day, “I wonder if it’s a twist of the absurd mediaeval ascetic perversity left over?” Or again, “All it does for me is to take off the curse of belonging to the bourgeoisie.”  But no matter what skeptical name she called it, nor how much she minimized the reality of it, she felt some odd value in it which she would not have gone without.  Once she said to herself, “It’s ballast, to a person like me,” although she did not know exactly what this meant.  And another time she said, “Perhaps it’s that I’m making an honest effort to do my share.”  But it was true and real, the fact that after such work the reading of the day’s news of the world brought her a less oppressive sense of guilt.  And stranger than this, music had greater vitality for her.  She felt it a deeper, richer soil than even she had dreamed of, and struck her roots profoundly into depths which kept her whole complicated organism poised, steady, and upright.