, you do, do you?" said Marsh, going out after his companion.

* * * * *

They were very far from the Negroes in Georgia.

CHAPTER VIII

WHAT GOES ON INSIDE

_Half an Hour in the Life of a Modern Woman_

May 8.

Marise looked at the clock. They all three looked at the clock. On
school mornings the clock dominated their every instant. Marise often
thought that the swinging of its great pendulum was as threatening as
the Pendulum that swung in the Pit. Back and forth, back and forth,
bringing nearer and nearer the knife-edge of its dire threat that nine
o'clock would come and the children not be in school. Somehow they must
all manage to break the bonds that held them there and escape from the
death-trap before the fatal swinging menace reached them. The stroke of
nine, booming out in that house, would be like the Crack o' Doom to the
children.

Marise told Paul not to eat so fast, and said to Elly, who was finishing
her lessons and her breakfast together, "I let you do this, this one
time, Elly, but I don't want you to let it happen again. You had plenty
of time yesterday to get that done."

She stirred her coffee and thought wistfully, "What a policeman I must
seem to the children. I wish I could manage it some other way."

Elly, her eyes on the book, murmured in a low chanting rhythm, her mouth
full of oatmeal, "Delaware River, Newcastle, Brandywine, East Branch,
West Branch, Crum Creek, Schuylkill."

Paul looked round at the clock again. His mother noted the gesture, the
tension of his attitude, his preoccupied expression, and had a quick
inner vision of a dirty, ragged, ignorant, gloriously free little boy on
a raft on the Mississippi river, for whom life was not measured out by
the clock, in thimbleful doses, but who floated in a golden liberty on
the very ocean of eternity. "Why can't we bring them up like Huckleberry
Finns!" she thought, protestingly, pressing her lips together.

Then she laughed inwardly at the thought of certain sophisticated
friends and their opinion of her life. "I daresay we do seem to be
bringing them up like Huckleberry Finns, in the minds of any of the New
York friends, Eugenia Mills for instance!" She remembered with a passing
gust of amusement the expression of slightly scared distaste which
Eugenia had for the children. "Too crudely quivering lumps of
life-matter for Eugenia's taste," she thought, and then, "I wonder what
Marsh's fee