r gravely, "Don't you love me? Don't you think that I love
you?"

She looked at him piteously, wincing, bracing herself with an effort to
be brave. "I must try to be as honest as I want you to be. Yes, I love
you, Neale, with all my heart a thousand times more than I ever dreamed
I could love anybody. But how do I know that I'm not somehow fooling
myself: but that maybe all that huge unconscious inheritance from all my
miserable ancestors hasn't _got_ me, somehow, and you too? How do I know
that I'm not being fooled by Nature and fooling you with fine words?"

She hesitated, probing deep into her heart, and brought out now, like a
great and unexpected treasure, "But, Neale, listen! I _don't_ think that
about you! I don't believe you're being fooled. Why, I believe in you
more than in myself!" She was amazed at this and radiant.

Then she asked him, "Neale, how do _you_ manage about all this? What do
you feel about all the capacity for being low and bad, that everybody
has? Aren't you afraid that they'll get the best of us, inevitably,
unless we let ourselves get so dull, and second-rate and passive, that
we can't even be bad? Are you afraid of being fooled? Do you believe in
yourself at all?"

He was silent for some time, his eyes steadily fixed on some invisible
realm. When he spoke it was with a firm, natural, unshaken accent. "Why,
yes, I think it very likely that I am being fooled all the time. But I
don't think it matters the least bit in the world beside the fact that I
love you. That's big enough to overtop everything else."

He raised his voice and spoke out boldly to the undefined specter in her
mind. "And if it's the mating instinct you mean, that may be fooling
both of us, because of our youth and bodily health . . . good heavens!
Isn't our love deep enough to absorb that a million times over, like the
water of a little brook flowing into the sea? Do you think _that_, which
is only a little trickle and a harmless and natural and healthy little
trickle, could unsalt the great ocean of its savor? Why, Marise, all
that you're so afraid of, all that they've made you so afraid of, . . .
it's like the little surface waves . . . well, call it the big storm waves
if you want to . . . but nothing at all, the biggest of them, compared to
the stillness in the depths of the sea. Why, I love you! Do I believe in
myself? Of course I believe in myself, because I have you."

She drew a long sigh and, closing her eyes, m