She was aware that she was speaking not to sympathizers.  Mr. Welles looked vague, evidently had no idea what she meant.  Mr. Marsh’s face looked closed tight, as though he would not open to let in a word of what she was saying.  He almost looked hostile.  Why should he?  When she stopped, a little abashed at having been carried along by her feelings, Mr. Marsh put in lightly, with no attempt at transition, “All that’s very well.  But you can’t make me believe that by choice you live up her all the year around.  You must nearly perish away with homesickness for the big world, you who so evidently belong in it.”

“Where is the big world?” she challenged him, laughing.  “When you’re young you want to go all round the globe to look for it.  And when you’ve gone, don’t you find that your world everywhere is about as big as you are?”

Mr. Marsh eyed her hard, and shook his head, with a little scornful downward thrust of the corners of his mouth, as though he were an augur who refused to lend himself to the traditional necessity to keep up the appearance of believing in an exploded religion. “You know where the big world is,” he said firmly.  “It’s where there are only people who don’t have to work, who have plenty of money and brains and beautiful possessions and gracious ways of living, and few moral scruples.”  He defined it with a sovereign disregard for softening phrases.

She opposed to this a meditative, “Oh, I suppose the real reason why I go less and less to New York, is that it doesn’t interest me as it used to.  Human significance is what makes interest for me, and when you’re used to looking deep into human lives out of a complete knowledge of them as we do up here, it’s very tantalizing and tormenting and after a while gets boring, the superficial, incoherent glimpses you get in such a smooth, glib-tongued circle as the people I happen to know in New York.  It’s like trying to read something in a language of which you know only a few words, and having the book shown to you by jerks at that!”

Mr. Marsh remarked speculatively, as though they were speaking of some quite abstract topic, “It may also be possibly that you are succumbing to habit and inertia and routine.”

She was startled again, and nettled . . . and alarmed.  What a rude thing to say!  But the words were no sooner out of his mouth than she had felt a scared wonder if perhaps they were not true.  She had not thought of that possibility.

“I should think you would like the concerts, anyhow,” suggested Mr. Welles.

“Yes,” said Marise, with the intonation that made the affirmation almost a negative.  “Yes, of course.  But there too . . . music means so much to me, so very much.  It makes me sick to see it pawed over as it is among people who make their livings out of it; used as it so often is as a background for the personal vanity or greed of the performer.  Take an ordinary afternoon solo concert given by a pianist or singer . . . it always seems to me that the music they make is almost an unconsidered by-product with them.  What they’re really after is something else.”