He pronounced this in a perfectly impersonal tone, but something about the quality of his voice made Marise flash a quick glance at him.  His eyes met hers with a sudden, bold deepening of their gaze.  Marise’s first impulse was to be startled and displeased, but in an instant a quick fear of being ridiculous had voiced itself and was saying to her, “Don’t be countrified.  It’s only that I’ve had no contact with people-of-the-world for a year now.  That’s the sort of thing they get their amusement from.  It would make him laugh to have it resented.”  Aloud she said, rather at random, “I usually go down once a season to the city for a visit to this old friend of mine, and other friends there.  But this last winter I didn’t get up the energy to do that.”

“I should think,” said Mr. Welles, “that last winter you’d have used up all your energy on other things, from what Mrs. Powers tells me about the big chorus you always lead here in winters.”

“That does take up a lot of time,” she admitted.  “But it’s a generator of energy, leading a chorus is, not a spender of it.”

“Oh, come!” protested Marsh.  “You can’t put that over on me.  To do it as I gather you do . . . heavens!  You must pour out your energy and personality as though you’d cut your arteries and let the red flood come.”

“You pour it out all right,” she agreed, “but you get it back a thousand times over.”  She spoke seriously, the topic was vital to her, her eyes turned inward on a recollection.  “It’s amazing.  It’s enough to make a mystic out of a granite boulder.  I don’t know how many times I’ve dragged myself to a practice-evening dog-tired physically with work and care of the children, stale morally, sure that I had nothing in me that was profitable for any purpose, feeling that I’d do anything to be allowed to stay at home, to doze on the couch and read a poor novel.”  She paused, forgetting to whom she was speaking, forgetting she was not alone, touched and stirred with a breath from those evenings.

“Well . . . ?” prompted Mr. Marsh.  She wondered if she were mistaken in thinking he sounded a little irritable.

“Well,” she answered, “it has not failed a single time.  I have never come back otherwise than stronger, and rested, the fatigue and staleness all gone, buried deep in something living.”  She had a moment of self-consciousness here, was afraid that she had been carried away to seem high-flown or pretentious, and added hastily and humorously, “You mustn’t think that it’s because I’m making anything wonderful out of my chorus of country boys and girls and their fathers and mothers.  It’s no notable success that puts wings to my feet as I come home from that work.  It’s only the music, the hearty satisfying singing-out, by ordinary people, of what too often lies withering in their hearts.”