She started up and went to the window, looking out blankly at the mountain wall, as she had at the newspaper, not seeing what was there, her eyes turned inward.  “Wait now, wait.  Don’t go off, half-cocked.  Go clear through with this thing,” she exhorted herself.  “There must be more in it than mere childish, silly vanity.”  She probed deep and brought up, “Yes, there is more to it.  In the first place I was priggish and hypocritical when I tried to pretend that it was nothing to me when I looked in the glass and saw for the first time that my youth has begun to leave me.  That was Anglo-Saxon pretense, trying to seem to myself made of finer stuff than I really am.  It’s really not cheerful for any woman, no matter on what plane, to know that the days of her physical flowering are numbered.  I’d have done better to look straight at that, and have it out with myself.”

She moved her head very slightly, from side to side.  “But there was more than that.  There was more than that.  What was it?” She leaned her ear as if to listen, her eyes very large and fixed.  “Yes, there was the war, and the awfulness of our disappointment in it, too, after all.  There was the counsel of despair about everything, the pressure on us all to think that all efforts to be more than base are delusions.  We were so terribly fooled with our idealistic hopes about the war . . . who knows but that we are being fooled again when we try for the higher planes of life?  Perhaps those people are right who say that to grab for the pleasures of the senses is the best . . . those are real pleasures, at least.  Who knows if there is anything else?”

Something like a little, far-away tolling said to her, “There was something else.  There was something else.”

This time she knew what it was.  “Yes, there was that other aspect of the loss of physical youth, when you think that the pleasures of the senses are perhaps all there are.  There was the inevitable despairing wonder if I had begun to have out of my youth all it could have given, whether . . .”

There tolled in her ear, “Something else, something else there.”  But now she would not look, put her hands over her eyes, and stood in the dark, fighting hard lest a ray of light should show her what might be there.

A voice sounded beside her.  Toucle was saying, “Have you got one of your headaches?  The mail carrier just went by.  Here are the letters.”

She took down her hands, and opened her eyes.  She felt that something important hung on there being a letter from Neale.  She snatched at the handful of envelopes and sorted them over, her fingers trembling.  Yes, there it was, the plain stamped envelope with Neale’s firm regular handwriting.

She felt as though she were a diver whose lungs had almost collapsed, who was being drawn with heavenly swiftness up to the surface of the water.  She tore open the envelope and read, “Dearest Marise.”  It was as though she had heard his voice.