“But Warren, after all, isn’t a child!” Rachael said sadly.

“But Warren is in some ways; that’s just it,” Alice said eagerly.  “He has always been singularly—­well, unbalanced, in some ways.  Don’t you know there was always a sort of simplicity, a sort of bright innocence about Warren?  He believed whatever anybody said until you laughed at him; he took every one of his friends on his own valuation.  It’s only where his work is concerned that you ever see Warren positive, and dictatorial, and keen—­”

Rachael’s eyes had filled with tears.

“But he isn’t the man I loved, and married,” she said slowly.  “I thought he was a sort of god—­he could do no wrong for me!”

“Yes, but that isn’t the way to feel toward anybody,” persisted Alice.  “No man is a god, no man is perfect.  You’re not perfect yourself; I’m not.  Can’t you just say to yourself that human beings are faulty—­it may be your form of it to get dignified and sulk, and Warren’s to wander off dreamily into curious paths—­but that’s life, Rachael, that’s ‘better or worse,’ isn’t it?”

“It isn’t a question of my holding out for a mere theory, Alice,” Rachael said after a while; “I’m not saying that I’m all in the right, and that I will never see Warren again until he admits it, and everyone admits it—­that isn’t what I want.  But it’s just that I’m dead, so far as that old feeling is concerned.  It is as if a child saw his mother suddenly turn into a fiend, and do some hideously cruel act; no amount of cool reason could ever convince that child again that his mother was sweet and good.”

“But as you get older,” Alice smiled, “you differentiate between good and good, and you see grades in evil, too.  Everything isn’t all good or all bad, like the heroes and the villains of the old plays.  If Warren had done a ‘hideously cruel’ thing deliberately, that would be one thing; what he has done is quite another.  The God who made us put sex into the world, Warren didn’t; and Warren only committed, in his—­what is it?—­forty-eighth year one of the follies that most boys dispose of in their teens.  Be generous, Rachael, and forgive him.  Give him another trial!”

“How can I forgive him?” Rachael said, badly shaken, and through tears.  “No, no, no, I couldn’t!  I never can.”

They had reached the beach now, and could see the children, in their blue field coats, following the curving reaches of the incoming waves.  The fresh roar of the breakers filled a silence, gulls piped their wistful little cry as they circled high in the blue air.  Old Captain Semple, in his rickety one-seated buggy, drove up the beach, the water rising in the wheel-tracks.  The children gathered about him; it was one of their excitements to see the Captain wash his carriage, and the old mare splash in the shallow water.  Alice seated herself on a great log, worn silver from the sea, and half buried in the white sand, but Rachael remained standing, the sweet October wind whipping against her strong and splendid figure, her beautiful eyes looking far out to sea.