“Oh, Mr. Welles,” Marise appealed to him, “do you think that is the truth of the facts?”

The old man pronounced judgment gently.  “Well, I don’t know that anything is the truth.  I should say that both of you told the truth about it.  The truth’s pretty big for any one person to tell.  Isn’t it all in the way you look at it?” He added, “Only personally I think Mrs. Crittenden’s the nicest way.”

Marsh was delighted with this.  “There!  I hope you’re satisfied.  You’ve been called ‘nice.’  That ought to please any good American.”

“I wonder, Mr. Welles,” Marise said in an ostentatiously casual tone, “I wonder if Mr. Marsh had been an ancient Greek, and had stood watching the procession going up the Acropolis hill, bearing the thank-offerings from field and loom and vineyard, what do you suppose he would have seen?  Dullness and insensitiveness in the eyes of those Grecian farmer-lads, no doubt, occupied entirely with keeping the oxen in line; a low vulgar stare of bucolic curiosity as the country girls, bearing their woven linen, looked up at the temple.  Don’t you suppose he would have thought they managed those things a great deal more artistically in Persia?”

“Well, I don’t know much about the ancient Greeks,” said Mr. Welles mildly, “but I guess Vincent would have been about the same wherever he lived.”

“Who is satisfied with the verdict now?” triumphed Marise.

But she noticed that Marsh’s attack, although she considered that she had refuted it rather neatly, had been entirely; efficacious in destroying the aura of the evening.  Of the genuine warmth of feeling which the flower and the people around it had roused in her heart, not the faintest trace was left.  She had only a cool interested certainty that her side had a perfectly valid foundation for arguing purposes.  Mr. Marsh had accomplished that, and more than that, a return from those other centers of feeling to her preoccupation with his own personality.

He now went on, “But I’m glad to have gone.  I saw a great deal else there than your eccentric plant and the vacancy of mind of those sons of toil, cursed, soul-destroying toil.  For one thing, I saw a woman of very great beauty.  And that is always so much gained.”

“Oh yes,” cried Marise, “that’s so.  I forgot that you could see that.  I’ve grown so used to the fact that people here don’t understand how splendidly handsome Nelly Powers is.  Their taste doesn’t run to the statuesque, you know.  They call that grand silent calm of her, stupidness!  Ever since ’Gene brought her here as a bride, a year after we came to live in Crittenden’s, I have gone out of my way to look at her.  You should see her hanging out the clothes on a windy day.  One sculptured massive pose after another.  But even to see her walk across the room and bend that shining head is thrilling.”

“I saw something else, too,” went on Marsh, a cool voice speaking out of the darkness.  “I saw that her black, dour husband is furiously in love with her and furiously jealous of that tall, ruddy fellow with an expressive face, who stood by the door in shirt-sleeves and never took his eyes from her.”