The Brimming Cup
CHAPTER XIV
BESIDE THE ONION-BED
July 10.
Marise pulled nervously and rapidly at the weeds among the
onions, and wiped away with her sleeve the drops that ran down her
hot, red face. She was not rebellious at the dusty, tiresome task,
nor aware of the merciless heat of the early-summer sun. She was
not indeed thinking at all of what she was doing, except that the
physical effort of stooping and reaching and pulling was a relief
to her, made slightly less oppressive the thunder-heavy moral
atmosphere she breathed. She was trying to think, but the different
impressions came rushing into her mind with such vehement haste
that they dashed against each other brutally, to her entire
confusion.
When she tried to think out an answer to this perfectly
preposterous idea of old Mr. Welles, why should a thousand other
horrifying ideas which she had been keeping at bay pour in through
the door, once opened to probing thought? What possible connection
could there be between such a fantastic crazy notion as his, and
those other heaving, looming possibilities which rolled themselves
higher and murkier the longer she refused to look at them? She
snatched at the weeds, twitching them up, flinging them down,
reaching, straining, the sun molten on her back, the sweat stinging
on her face. It was a silly impression of course, but it seemed to
her that if she hurried fast enough with the weeds, those thoughts
and doubts could not catch up with her.
She had put them off, and put them off while Neale was away,
because they scared her, and she didn't want to look at them
without Neale. But he had been back for weeks now and still she put
them off. All those tarnishing sayings, those careless, casual
negations of what she had taken for axioms; that challenge to her
whole life dropped from time to time as though it were an accepted
commonplace with all intelligent beings. . . .
Was her love for the children only an inverted form of sensual
egotism, an enervating slavery for them, really only a snatched-up
substitute for the personal life which was ebbing away from her?
Was her attitude towards her beloved music a lazy, self-indulgent
one, to keep it to herself and the valley here? Was that growing
indifference of hers to dress and trips to the city, and seeing
Eugenia's smart crowd there, a sign of mental dry-rot? Was it a
betrayal of what was alive in her own personality to go on adapting
herself to the inevitable changes in her relations with Neale,
compromising, rather than . . ."
"Aren't you awfully hot to go on doing that?" asked Neale,
coming up behind her, from the road. She was startled because she
had not heard him approach on the soft, cultivated ground of the
garden. And as she turned her wet, crimson face up to his, he was
startled himself. "Why, what's the matter, dear?" he asked
anxiously.
She sank back to a sitting position, drawing a long breath,
mopping her forehead with her sleeve, as unconscious of her looks
before Neale as though she had still been alone. She motioned him
down beside her. "Oh, Neale, I'm so glad! How'd you happen to be so
early? Maybe if we stay right out here, where the children won't
know where we are, we can have a few minutes quite to ourselves.
Touclé is going to get tea tonight. Neale, sit down a
minute. I want to tell you something. I'm awfully upset. I went
over to help Mr. Welles transplant his Brussels sprouts, and we got
to talking. Neale, what do you suppose has been in his mind all
this time we've been thinking him so happy and contented here?"
"Doesn't he like Crittenden's? Find it dull?"
"No, no, not that, a bit. He loves it. It's
heart-breaking to see how much he loves it!" She stopped, her voice
shaking a little, and waited till she could get it under control.
Her husband took her stained, dusty hand in his. She gave his
fingers a little pressure, absently, not noting what she did, and
seeing the corner of his handkerchief showing in the pocket of his
shirt, she pulled it out with a nervous jerk, and wiped her face
all over with it.
He waited in silence.
"Listen, Neale, I know it will sound perfectly crazy to you, at
first. But you might as well believe it, for he is serious. It
seems he's been getting lots more letters from that niece or cousin
of his, down in Georgia. She tells him about things, how the
Negroes are treated, all the Jim Crow business carried into every
single detail of every single minute of every single day. It seems
they're not badly treated as long as they'll stay day-laborers or
servants, but . . . oh well, there's no need to go on with telling
you . . . you know. We all know well enough what the
American attitude is. Only I didn't think it could be so bad, or so
everlastingly kept up every minute, as this cousin tells him. I
suppose she ought to know. She's lived there for forty years. She
keeps citing instances she's seen." Marise broke out with a fierce,
blaming sharpness, "I don't see what business she had,
writing him that way. I think it was beastly of her. Why couldn't
she let him alone!"
She felt her husband waiting patiently for her to quiet down and
go on more coherently, and knew that his patience came from a long
acquaintance with her mental habits, a certainty that her outbursts
of feeling generally did quiet down if one waited: and across her
genuine absorption in the story she was telling there flitted,
bat-like, a distaste far being known so well as all that! There was
something indiscreet and belittling in it, she thought, with an
inward fastidious recoil. But this had gone, entirely, in a moment,
and she was rushing on, "And, Neale, what do you think? She
has worked on him, and he has worked on himself till he's got
himself in a morbid state. He thinks perhaps he ought to leave
Ashley that he loves so much and go down to live where this horrid
cousin lives. . . ."
Her husband's astonishment at this was as great as she could
have desired. None of Neale's usual, unsurprised acceptance of
everything that happened as being in the nature of things, which
occasionally so rubbed her the wrong way, and seemed to her so
wilfully phlegmatic. He was sincerely amazed and astounded; that
was plain from his exclamation, his tone, his face. Of course he
wasn't as outraged as she, but that wasn't to be expected, since he
hadn't seen so much of that dear old life-worn man, nor grown so
protectingly fond of him. She revelled in Neale's astonishment as
bearing out her own feeling. "Isn't it crazy, Neale! Don't you
think it crazy! Is there the slightest justification for it? You
feel, just as I do, don't you, that it's a perfectly unbalanced,
fanatical, foolish thing to think of doing, his going down
into that hopeless mess?"
But her husband had had a moment's time, while she exclaimed, to
get back to his usual unhurried post in life. "It's certainly about
as unexpected as anything I ever heard of," he admitted. "I should
have to know a lot more about it, before I could be sure what to
think."
An old impatience, at an old variance between their ways of
thought, came out with an edge in Marise's tone as she said hotly,
"Oh, Neale, don't take that line of yours! You know all
there is to know, now! What else could you find out? You know how
he's given all his life to looking out for his family, ending up
with years of that bed-ridden old aunt the others wished on to him,
just because he was too soft-hearted to get out from under. You
know how anxious the Company was to do something to make up to him
for all the years of service he gave them. And you know how happy
he has been here, how he's loved it all, and fathered every root
and seed in his garden, and how he and Paul have struck up such a
sweet affection, and how he could be happier and happier." She
struck her hands together. "Oh, Neale, I can't have him do such a
foolish, useless thing, and spoil his life! It's not as if he'd be
of any use down in Georgia. You know how the Southern white people
detest Northerners coming down and interfering with the Negroes.
Maybe they're wrong. But they're the people who live there. What
could he do against them? What under the sun could one
tired-out old man accomplish in a situation that every American
knows to be simply impossible?" She looked hard at her husband's
thoughtful face and threw herself against him with a petulant
gesture. "Now, Neale, don't go and justify him! Don't say you think
he's right."
He put his arm about her shoulders, hot and wet under their
gingham covering, and she leaned against him, the gesture as
unconsidered and unconscious for the one as the other. "No, I'm not
going to try to justify him. I suppose I think he's very foolish.
But I must say it shows a pretty fine spirit. I take off my hat to
his intention."
"Oh yes, his intention . . ." conceded Marise. "He's an old
saint, of course. Only he mustn't be allowed to ruin his life and
break everybody's heart, even if he is a saint."
"That's the way saints usually run their business, isn't it?"
asked Neale. "And I'd like to know how anybody's going to keep him
from doing it, if he decides he ought to."
"Oh yes, we can," urged Marise, sitting up with energy. "We can,
every one of us, throw ourselves against it, argue with him, tell
him that it seems to us not only foolish, and exaggerated, and
morbid, but conceited as if he thought what he did would
count so very much. We can make him feel that it would be sort of
cheating the Company, after what they've done for him; we can just
mass all our personalities against it, use moral suasion, get
excited, work on his feelings . . . she has done that, that
cousin!"
"I wouldn't want to do that," said Neale quietly. "You can, if
you think best."
She recognized a familiar emergence of granite in his voice and
aspect and cried out on it passionately, "Now, Neale!"
He knew perfectly well what this meant, without further words
from her. They looked at each other, an unspoken battle going on
with extreme rapidity between them, over ground intimately
familiar. In the middle of this, she broke violently into words,
quite sure that he would know at which point she took it up. "You
carry that idea to perfectly impossible lengths, Neale. Don't you
ever admit that we ought to try to make other people act the way we
think best, even when we know we're right and they're
wrong?"
"Yes," admitted her husband, "I should think we were bound to.
If we ever were sure we were right and they wrong."
She gave the impression of vibrating with impatience and cried
out, "That's pettifogging. Of course there are times when we are
sure. Suppose you saw a little child about to take hold of the
red-hot end of a poker?"
"A child is different," he opposed her. "All grown-ups are
responsible for all children. I suppose I'd keep him from taking
hold of it. And yet I'm not dead sure I'd be right. If I thought he
was only just going to touch it, to see if it really would burn him
as people had told him, I guess I'd let him."
"You always get around things," she said blamingly, "but there
are cases when you could be sure. Suppose you saw Aunt Hetty
just about to take poison, or Frank Warner getting Nelly Powers to
run away with him?"
He was startled by this, and asked quickly with a change of
tone, "Whatever made you think of that? Are Frank and Nelly . . .
?"
"Oh, it just came into my head. No, I haven't heard anybody has
said anything, noticed anything. But I had a sort of notion that
'Gene doesn't like Frank hanging around the house so much."
"Well . . ." commented her husband, with a lively accent of
surprise. "I hadn't dreamed of such a thing. And it throws a light
on something I happened to see this afternoon, on my way home. I
came round the back way, the ravine road below the Eagle Rocks. I
wanted to see about some popple we're thinking of buying from the
Warners, on the shoulder beyond the Rocks. It didn't occur to me,
of course, that anybody else would be up there, but just at the
peak of the shoulder I saw 'Gene Powers, lying down beside a big
beech-tree. He didn't hear me, walking on the pine-needles. And for
a minute I stood there, and honestly didn't know what to do."
"How do you mean . . . 'lying down'?" asked Marise, not
visualizing the scene. "As though he were sick?"
"No, not a bit that way. Not on his back, but on his face,
looking over the edge of the ridge. All strung up like a bow, his
head down between his shoulders and shot forwards like a cat
stalking something. I tell you, he made me think of a hunter
when he thinks he sees a deer. I thought probably he had. I've seen
a buck and some does up there lately. Then he saw me and jumped up
very quickly and came down past me. I was going to say, just for
the sake of saying something, 'Laying your plans for next
deer-week?' But as he went by and nodded, he looked at me with such
an odd expression that I thought I'd better not. The idea came to
me that maybe 'Gene does poach and occasionally take a deer out of
season. Meat is so high it wouldn't be surprising. They have a
pretty hard time scraping along. I don't know as I'd blame him if
he did shoot a deer once in a while.
"Well, after I'd been on beyond and made my estimate on the
popple, I came back that way. And as I passed where he'd been
lying, I thought, just for curiosity, I'd go up and see if I could
see what he'd been looking at so hard. I got up to the big beech
where he'd been, and looked over. And I got the surprise of my
life. He couldn't have been looking at deer, for on the other side
the cliff drops down sheer, and you look right off into air, across
the valley. I was so surprised I stood there, taken aback. The
afternoon train went up the valley while I stood there, staring. It
looked so tiny. You're really very high on those Rocks. I noticed
you could see your Cousin Hetty's house from there, and the mill
and the Powers house. That looked like a child's plaything, so
little, under the big pine. And just as I looked at that, I saw a
man come out from the house, get on a horse, and ride away."
"Why, that must have been Frank," said Marise. "He rides that
roan mare of his as much as he drives her."
"Yes, that's what came into my mind when you spoke his name just
now in connection with Nelly. I hadn't thought anything of it,
before."
There was a moment's silence as they looked at each other.
"Oh, Neale!" said Marise, on a deep note. "How awful! You
don't suppose there is anything in his jealousy. . . . Nelly is as
inscrutable in her way as 'Gene."
"Heavens! how should I know? But my guess is that 'Gene is
making a fool of himself for nothing. Nelly doesn't strike me as
being the sort of woman to . . ."
"But Frank is awfully good-looking and dashing, and lots younger
than 'Gene. And Nelly is young too and perfectly stunning to look
at. And she's not one of our native valley girls, you know. It may
seem very dull and cooped-up here, so far from town, and shops. She
may envy her sisters, still living back in West Adams with city
life around them."
"Oh, it's possible enough, I suppose," admitted Neale. "But she
seems perfectly contented, and thinks the world of the
children."
Marise's face clouded. The phrase had recalled her dark
preoccupations of a moment ago. "Lots of people nowadays would say
she seems to be fond of the children because she is using them to
fill up a lack in her life," she said somberly; "that 'Gene no
longer satisfied her, and that she fed on the children because she
was starving emotionally." Her husband making no comment on this,
she went on, "Neale, don't you think that people are saying horrid,
distressing things nowadays? About marriage I mean, and all
relations between men and women and between parents and children?"
Her heart was beating faster as she finished this question. The
subject was broached at last. Where would it lead them? Where would
it lead them? She shut her eyes at the thought.
"There's a good deal to be said about all that, that's pretty
horrid and perfectly true," remarked Neale casually. He tilted his
hat further over his eyes and leaned back, propping himself on one
elbow.
"Neale!" she protested, shocked and repelled. She had
hoped for something very different from Neale. But she thought, in
a momentary exasperation with him, she might have known she would
not get it. He always took everything so abstractedly, so
impersonally.
"I don't see any use in pretending there's not," he advanced
with a reasonable, considering air. "I don't see that intimate
human relationships are in any more of a mess than other
human relations. International ones, for instance, just now. But
they certainly are in considerable of a mess, in a great many
cases. It is evident that lots of times they're managed all
wrong."
Marise was so acutely disappointed that she felt a quavering
ache in her throat, and kept silence for a moment. So this was what
she had looked forward to, as a help. What was Neale there
for, if not for her to lean against, to protect her, to be a
defending wall about her? He was so strong and so clearheaded, he
could be such a wall if he chose. How stern and hard he was, the
core of him!
"Neale," she said after a moment, "I wonder if you even
know what things are being said about what we've always
believed in . . . motherhood for instance, and marriage?"
She had been unable to keep the quaver out of her voice, and at
the sound of it, he sat up instantly, astonished, solicitous,
tender. "Why, darling, what's the matter?" he said again, moving
closer to her, bending over her.
"How can you think such things without their making you
perfectly miserable, without making you want to go straight and cut
your throat?" she cried out on his callousness.
He put his arm about her again, not absently this time, and drew
her close. She thought angrily, "He thinks it's just a fit of
nerves I can be soothed out of like a child," and pulled away from
him.
He looked at her, his attentive, intelligent look, and let his
arm drop. And yet, although he was serious now, she was sure that
he saw only that the subject agitated her, and did not see any
possibility that it might touch them both, personally.
"I have to think whatever I'm convinced is true, whether it
makes me miserable or not, don't I?" he said gently. "And it does
make me miserable, of course. Who can help being miserable at the
spectacle of such rich possibilities as human life is full of,
mismanaged and spoiled and lost?"
"But, Neale, do you realize that people are thinking, books are
being written to prove that parents' love for their children is
only self-love, hypocritically disguised, and sometimes even sexual
love camouflaged; and that anybody is better for the children to be
with than their mother; and that married people, after the first
flare-up of passion is over, hate each other instead of
loving?"
"I daresay there's a certain amount of truth in that,
occasionally. It would certainly explain some of the inexplicable
things we all see happen in family life," he remarked.
Marise started and cried out piercingly, "Neale, how can you say
such things to me!"
He looked at her keenly again, keenly and penetratingly, and
said, "I'm not one of those who think it inherent in the nature of
women to take abstract propositions personally always. But I do
think they will have to make a big effort to get themselves out of
a mighty old acquired habit of thinking every general observation
is directed at them personally."
She flashed out indignantly at him, "How can you help taking it
personally when it shakes the very foundations of our life?"
He was astonished enough at this to suit even her. His face
showed the most genuine amazed incapacity to understand her.
"Shakes the . . . why, Marise dear, what are you talking about? You
don't have to believe about yourself all the generalizing
guesses that people are writing down in books, do you, if it
contradicts your own experience? Just because you read that lots of
American men had flat-foot and were refused at the recruiting
station for that, you don't have to think your own feet flat, do
you? If you do think so, all you have to do is to start out and
walk on them, to know for sure they're all right. Heavens and
earth! People of our age, who have really lived, don't need
somebody in a book to tell them what's happening to them. Don't you
know whether you really love Elly and Mark and Paul? If you
don't, I should think a few minutes' thought and recollection of
the last ten years would tell you, all right. Don't you know
whether we hate each other, you and I?"
Marise drew a long breath of relief. This was the sort of talk
she wanted. She clutched at the strong hand which seemed at last
held out to her. She did so want to be talked out of it all. "Oh
good! then, Neale, you don't believe any of that sort of talk? You
were only saying so for argument."
He withdrew the hand. "Yes, I do believe a good deal of as a
general proposition. What I'm saying, what I'm always saying, dear,
and trying my best to live, is that everybody must decide for
himself when a general proposition applies to him, what to believe
about his own life and its values. Nobody else can tell him."
She approached along another line. "But, Neale, that's all very
well for you, because you have so much withstandingness in you. But
for me, there are things so sacred, so intimate, so much a part of
me, that only to have some rough hand laid on them, to have them
pulled out and pawed over and thought about . . . it frightens me
so, sets me in such a quiver! And they don't seem the same again.
Aren't there things in life so high and delicate that they
can't stand questioning?"
He considered this a long time, visibly putting all his
intelligence on it. "I can't say, for you," he finally brought out.
"You're so much finer and more sensitive than I. But I've never in
all these years seen that your fineness and your sensitiveness make
you any less strong in the last analysis. You suffer more, respond
more to all the implications of things; but I don't see that there
is any reason to think there's any inherent weakness in you that
need make you afraid to look at facts."
He presented this testimony to her, seriously, gravely. It took
her breath, coming from him. She could only look at him in
speechless gratitude and swallow hard. Finally she said,
falteringly, "You're too good, Neale, to say that. I don't deserve
it. I'm awfully weak, many times."
"I wouldn't say it, if it weren't so," he answered, "and I
didn't say you weren't weak sometimes. I said you were strong when
all was said and done."
Even in her emotion, she had an instant's inward smile at the
Neale-like quality of this. She went on, "But don't you think there
is such a thing as spoiling beautiful elements in life, with
handling them, questioning them, for natures that aren't naturally
belligerent and ready to fight for what they want to keep? For
instance, when somebody says that children in a marriage are like
drift-wood left high on the rocks of a dwindled stream, tokens of a
flood-time of passion now gone by. . . ." She did not tell him who
had said this. Nor did he ask. But she thought by his expression
that he knew it had been Vincent Marsh.
He said heartily, "I should just call that a nasty-minded remark
from somebody who didn't know what he was talking about. And let it
go at that."
"There, you see," she told him, "that rouses your instinct to
resist, to fight back. But it doesn't mine. It just makes me
sick."
"Marise, I'm afraid that you have to fight for what you
want to keep in this world. I don't see any way out of it. And I
don't believe that anybody else can do your fighting for you. You
ask if it's not possible to have beautiful, intimate things spoiled
by questioning, criticisms, doubts. Yes, I do think it is, for
young people, who haven't learned anything of life at first hand. I
think they ought to be protected till they have been able to
accumulate some actual experience of life. That's the only weapon
for self-defense anybody can have, what he has learned of life,
himself. Young people are apt to believe what older people tell
them about life, because they don't know anything about it, yet,
themselves, and I think you ought to be careful what is questioned
in their presence. But I don't see that mature people ought to be
protected unless you want to keep them childish, as women used to
be kept. Nothing is your own, if you haven't made it so, and kept
it so."
"But, Neale, it's so sickeningly hard! Why do it? Why,
when everything seems all right, pry into the deep and hidden roots
of things? I don't want to think about the possibility of
some dreadful dry-rot happening to married people's feelings
towards each other, as they get older and get used to each other.
It's soiling to my imagination. What's the use?"
She had so hoped he would help her to sweep them all back to the
cellar labeled "morbid" and lock them down in the dark again. Any
other man would, she thought, amazed at him, any other
husband! She focussed all her personality passionately to force him
to answer as she wished.
He fell into another thoughtful silence, glanced up at her once
sharply and looked down again. She always felt afraid of him when
he looked like that. No, not afraid of him, but of the relentless
thing he was going to say. Presently he said it. "What's the use?
Why, the very fact you seem afraid of it . . . I can't imagine why
. . . shows there would be some use. To turn your back on anything
you're afraid of, that's fatal, always. It springs on you from
behind."
She cried out to him in a sudden anguish that was beyond her
control, "But suppose you face it and still it springs!"
Her aspect, her accent, her shaken voice gave him a great start.
He faced her. He looked at her as though he saw her for the first
time that day. And he grew very pale as he looked. Something
wordless passed between them. Now he knew at last what she was
afraid of.
But he did not flinch. He said desperately, in a harsh voice,
"You have to take what comes to you in life," and was grimly
silent.
Then with a gesture as though to put away something incredible,
approaching him, he went on more quietly, "But my experience is
that it doesn't dare spring if you walk right up to it. Generally
you find you're less afraid of everything in the world, after
that."
She had been frightened, stabbed through and through by the look
they had interchanged, by the wordless something which had passed
between them. But now she wondered suddenly, passionately,
amazedly, if he had really understood all the dagger-like
possibilities of their talk.
"Neale," she challenged him, "don't you put any limits on
this? Isn't there anywhere you'd stop out of sheer respect?
Nothing too hallowed by . . ."
"Nothing. Nothing," he answered her, his face pale, his eyes
deep and enduring. "It's lying down, not to answer the challenge
when it comes. How do you know what you have to deal with if you
won't look to see? You may find out that something you have been
trusting is growing out of a poisonous root. That does happen.
What's the use of pretending that it couldn't to you, as to anybody
else? And what's the use of having lived honestly, if you haven't
grown brave enough to do whatever needs to be done? If you are
scared by the idea that your motherhood may be only inverted
sensuality, or if you think there is any possibility that the
children would be better off in other hands, or if you think . . .
if you think there is any other terrifying possibility in our life
here, for God's sake look into your own heart and see for yourself!
It all sounds like nonsense to me, but . . ."
She snatched at the straw, she who longed so for help. "Oh,
Neale, if you think so, I know . . ."
"I won't have you taking my word for it!" he told her
roughly. "I can't tell what's back of what you do. And you
oughtn't to take my word for it if I tried to. Nobody on earth can
make your decision for you, but you yourself." The drops stood out
on his forehead as he spoke, and ran down his pale face.
She quivered and was silent for a moment. Then, "Neale, where
shall I get the strength to do that?" she asked.
He looked full in her face. "I don't know anywhere to go for
strength but out of one's naked human heart," he said.
She shrank from the rigor of this with a qualm of actual fear.
"I think I must have something else," she told him wildly.
"I don't know," he returned. "I don't know at all about that.
I'm no mystic. I can't help you there, dear. But I know, as well as
I know anything on earth, that anything that's worth having in
anybody's life, his parent-hood, his marriage, his love, his
ambition, can stand any honest challenge it can be put to. If it
can't, it's not valid and ought to be changed or discarded." His
gaze on her was immeasurably steady.
She longed unspeakably for something else from him, some
warming, comforting assurance of help, some heartening, stimulating
encouragement along that stark, bleak way.
Somehow they were standing up now, both pale, looking profoundly
into each other's eyes. Something almost palpable, of which not a
word had been spoken aloud, came and stood there between them, and
through it they still looked at each other. They had left words far
behind now, in the fierce velocity of their thoughts.
And yet with the almost physical unity of their years of life
together, each knew the other's thoughts.
She flung herself against him as though she had cried out to
him. He put his arms strongly, tenderly about her, as though he had
answered.
With no words she had cried out, silently, desperately to him,
"Hold me! Hold me!"
And with no words, he had answered, silently, desperately, "No
one can hold you but yourself."
A shouting babble of voices rose in the distance. The children
crying to each other came out of the house-door and raced down the
flag-stone walk. "There they are! In the garden! By the onion-bed!
Father! Mother! We've been looking for you everywhere.
Touclé says if you'll let her, she'll boil down some maple
syrup for us to wax on ice for dessert."
They poured into the garden, children, cat and fox-terrier,
noisy, insistent, clamorous. Mark, always frankly greedy of his
mother's attention, pushed in jealously between his parents,
clinging to his mother's knees. He looked up in her face and
laughed out, his merry peal, "Oh, Mother, what a dirty face! You've
been suspiring and then you've wiped your forehead with your dirty
hand, the way you say I mustn't. How funny you look! And you've got
a great, long tear in your sleeve, too."
Behind them, tiny, smooth and glistening, Eugenia Mills strolled
to the edge of the garden, as far as the flag-stones went, and
stood waiting, palpably incapable of taking her delicate bronze
slippers into the dust.
"You've missed a kitchen call from that lively, earthy old Mrs.
Powers and her handsome daughter-in-law," she announced casually.
"Touclé says they brought some eggs. What a stunning
creature that Nelly is! There's temperament for you! Can't you just
feel the smouldering, primitive fire hidden under that scornful
silence of hers?"
"Mother, may we tell Touclé to put the syrup on to boil?"
begged Elly. Her hair was tangled and tousled, with bits of bark
sticking in it, and dried mud was caked on her hands and bare legs.
Marise thought of the repugnance she must have aroused in
Eugenia.
"Mother," said Paul, "Mr. Welles is going to give me a
fishing-rod, he says. A real one. Boughten."
"Oh, I want one too!" cried Mark, jumping up and down. "I want
one too."
"You're too little. Mother, isn't Mark too little? And
anyhow, he always breaks everything. You do, Mark, you know you do.
I take care of my things!"
Someone in the confusion stepped on the fox-terrier's toes and
he set up a shrill, aggrieved yelping. The children pawed at her
with dirty hands.
"Good-evening, Mr. Marsh," said Eugenia, looking over her
shoulder at the dark-haired figure in flannels approaching from the
other house. She turned and strolled across the grass to meet him,
as white and gleaming as he.
A sick qualm of self-contempt shook Marise. For, high and clear
above everything else, there had come into her mind a quick
discomfort at the contrast between her appearance and that of
Eugenia.