k, for in an instant the
piano began to chant again, not Tschaikowsky, Neale noted, but some of
the new people whom Marise was working over lately. He couldn't
understand a note of them, nor keep his mind on them, nor even try to
remember their names. He had been able to get just as far as Debussy and
no further, he thought whimsically, before his brain-channels hardened
in incipient middle-age.

He plunged into Trevelyan and the heart-quickening ups and downs of
battle.

Some time after this, he was pulled back from those critical and
glorious hours by the consciousness, gradually forcing itself on him on
two discomforts; his pipe had gone out and Eugenia was at it again. He
scratched a match and listened in spite of himself to that smooth liquid
voice. She was still harping on psycho-analysis. Wasn't she just the
kind of woman for whom that would have an irresistible fascination! He
gathered that Marise was objecting to it, just as sweepingly as Eugenia
was approving. How women did hate half-tones and reasonable
qualifications!

"I'm a gardener," Marise was saying, "and I know a thing or two about
natural processes. The thing to do with a manure pile is not to paw it
over and over, but to put it safely away in the dark, underground, and
never bother your head about it again except to watch the beauty and
vitality of the flowers and grains that spring from the earth it has
fertilized."

Neale as he held the lifted match over his pipe, shook his head. That
was all very well, put picturesquely as Marise always put things; but
you couldn't knock an idea on the head just with an apt metaphor. There
was a great deal more to be said about it, even if fool half-baked
faddists like Eugenia did make it ridiculous. In the first place it was
nothing so new. Everybody who had ever encountered a crisis in his life
and conquered it, had . . . why, he himself . . .

He felt his heart beat faster, and before he knew what was coming, he
felt a great, heart-quickening gust of fresh salt air blow over him, and
felt himself far from the book-tainted stagnant air of that indoor
room. He forgot to light his pipe and sat motionless, holding the
burning match till it flared up at the end and scorched his fingers.
Then he dropped it with a startled oath, and looked quickly around him.

In that instant he had lived over again the moment in Nova Scotia when
he had gone down to the harbor just as the battered little tramp steamer
was pull