“Well, you haven’t for hers, have you?” challenged Marise.  Neale looked thoughtful.  “I’m no mystic.  Their way of managing life often looks to me like sort of lying down on the job.  I’m no mystic and I’m no fish.  Looks to me as though the thing to do isn’t to go off in a far corner to get your momentary glimpse of daylight, but to batter a hole in the roof of your cave and let daylight in where you live all the time.  I can’t help being suspicious of a daylight that’s so uncertain you have to go away from life and hold your breath before you can see it for a minute.  I want it where I do my work.”

Marise looked at him, thinking deeply.  That was just what Neale did.  But when she looked back at the old Indian woman, just now turning into the wood-road, she sighed wistfully, and did not know why.

There was so very much growing always to be done in life.

IX

March 10.

(A letter from Eugenia:)

“. . .  I’m planning perhaps to make the trip to the temples in the Malay jungle.  Biskra was deadly, and Italy worse . . . vulgarity and commonness everywhere.  What an absolutely dreary outlook wherever one turns one’s eyes!  There is no corner of the modern world that is not vulgar and common.  Democracy has done its horrible leveling down with a vengeance . . .”

* * * * *

(A letter from Mr. Welles:)

“. . .  The life here is full of interest and change, and it’s like dew on my dusty old heart to see the vitality of the joy-in-life of these half-disinherited people.  I’m ashamed to tell you how they seem to love me and how good they are to me.  Their warmness of heart and their zest in life. . . .  I’m just swept back into youth again.  It makes me very much mortified when I think what a corking good time I am having and what sanctimonious martyr’s airs I put on about coming down here.  Of course a certain amount of my feeling younger and brisker comes from the fact that, working as I am, nobody feels about me the laid-on-the-shelf compassion which everybody (and me too) was feeling before.  I am somebody here and every time I say ‘Dr. Martin’ to a well-educated Negro physician whom another white man has just hailed as ‘Andy’ I feel not only a real sense of righteous satisfaction but the joyful mischievous fun that a small boy has.  Give my love to Paul (speaking of small boys) and tell him I’m saving up for the fishing-pole I am going to use when I go fishing with him next summer.  He said in his last letter he wanted to come down here and make me a visit; but you tell him I think he’d better get his growth before he does that.”

X

March 15, 1921.

From a profound sleep, serene warm infinity of rest, Marise was wakened by a little outcry near the bed, a sobbing voice saying through chattering teeth, “Mother!  Father!”