her
humanity.

The sore bitterness went out from his heart.

* * * * *

A voice called. She turned away. He felt himself following her. He
looked about him, light-headed with relief from pain. The quiet,
flowering world shimmered rainbow-like. What a strange power one human
being could have with another that a look could be an event!

He walked more slowly, feeling with a curious pleasure the insatiable
desire for possession ebbing from him. Why not let it ebb entirely? Why
not enjoy the ineffable sweetness of what he could have? That was what
would please her, what she would like, what she would give, freely. In
this moment of hush, he quite saw how it would be possible, although he
had never for a moment before in his life believed it. Yes, possible and
lovely. After all, he must stop sometime, and take the slower pace. Why
not now, when there was a certain and great prize to be won . . . ?

* * * * *

People talked around him. He talked and did not know his own words.
Marise spun those sparkling webs of nonsense of hers, and made him
laugh, but the next moment he could not have told what she had said. He
must somehow have been very tired to take such intense pleasure in being
at rest.

Her husband came, that rough and energetic husband. The children came,
the children whose restless, selfish, noisy preying on their mother
usually annoyed him so, and still the charm was not broken. Marise, as
she always did when her husband and children were there, retreated into
a remote plane of futile busyness with details that servants should have
cared for; answering the children's silly questions, belonging to
everyone, her personal existence blotted out. But this time he felt
still, deep within him, the penetrating sweetness of her eyes as she had
looked at him.

A tiresome, sophisticated friend of Marise's came, too, somehow
intruding another personality into the circle, already too full, and yet
he was but vaguely irritated by her. She only brought out by contrast
the thrilling quality of Marise's golden presence. He basked in that, as
in the sunshine, and thought of nothing else.

Possibilities he had never dreamed of, stretched before him,
possibilities of almost impersonal and yet desirable existence. Perhaps
this was the turning-point of his life. He supposed there really was
one, sometime, for everybody.

* * * * *