ake 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."

"But Nelly loves her children and they love her!" Marise brought this
out abruptly, impulsively, and felt, as she heard the words, that they
had a flat,