Marise was silent, startled by this shouting out of something she had preferred not to formulate.

“Vincent, you see too much,” said Mr. Welles resignedly.  The phrase ran from his tongue as though it were a familiar one.

Marise said slowly, “I’ve sometimes thought that Frank Warner did go to the Powers’ a good deal, but I haven’t wanted to think anything more.”

“What possible reason in the world have you for not wanting to?” asked Marsh with the most authentic accent of vivid and astonished curiosity.

“What reason . . . ?” she repeated blankly.

He said dispassionately, “I don’t like to hear you make such a flat, conventional, rubber-stamp comment.  Why in the world shouldn’t she love a fine, ardent, living man, better than that knotty, dead branch of a husband?  A beautiful woman and a living, strong, vital man, they belong together.  Whom God hath joined . . .  Don’t try to tell me that your judgment is maimed by the Chinese shoes of outworn ideas, such as the binding nature of a mediaeval ceremony.  That doesn’t marry anybody, and you know it.  If she’s really married to her husband, all right.  But if she loves another man, and knows in her heart that she would live a thousand times more fully, more deeply with him . . . why, she’s not married to her husband, and nothing can make her.  You know that!”

Marise sprang at the chance to turn his own weapons of mockery against him.  “Upon my word, who’s idealizing the Yankee mountaineer now?” she cried, laughing out as she spoke at the idea of her literal-minded neighbors dressed up in those trailing rhetorical robes.  “I thought you said they were so dull and insensitive they could feel nothing but an interest in two-headed calves, and here they are, characters in an Italian opera.  I only wish Nelly Powers were capable of understanding those grand languages of yours and then know what she thought of your idea of what’s in her mind.  And as for ’Gene’s jealousy, I’ll swear that it amounts to no more than a vague dislike for Frank Warner’s ’all the time hanging around and gassin’ instead of stickin’ to work.’  And you forget, in your fine modern clean-sweep, a few old-fashioned facts like the existence of three Powers children, dependent on their mother.”

“You’re just fencing, not really talking,” he answered imperturbably.  “You can’t pretend to be sincere in trying to pull that antimacassar home-and-mother stuff on me.  Ask Bernard Shaw, ask Freud, ask Mrs. Gilman, how good it is for children’s stronger, better selves, to live in the enervating, hot-house concentration on them of an unbalanced, undeveloped woman, who has let everything else in her personality atrophy except her morbid preoccupation with her own offspring.  That’s really the meaning of what’s sentimentally called ‘mothering.’  Probably it would be the best thing in the world for the Powers children if their mother ran away with that fine broth of a lad.”