ers
coming down and interfering with the Negroes. Maybe they're wrong. But
they're the people who live there. What could _he_ do against them? What
under the sun could one tired-out old man accomplish in a situation that
every American knows to be simply impossible?" She looked hard at her
husband's thoughtful face and threw herself against him with a petulant
gesture. "Now, Neale, don't go and justify him! Don't say you think he's
right."

He put his arm about her shoulders, hot and wet under their gingham
covering, and she leaned against him, the gesture as unconsidered and
unconscious for the one as the other. "No, I'm not going to try to
justify him. I suppose I think he's very foolish. But I must say it
shows a pretty fine spirit. I take off my hat to his intention."

"Oh yes, his intention . . ." conceded Marise. "He's an old saint, of
course. Only he mustn't be allowed to ruin his life and break
everybody's heart, even if he is a saint."

"That's the way saints usually run their business, isn't it?" asked
Neale. "And I'd like to know how anybody's going to keep him from doing
it, if he decides he ought to."

"Oh yes, we can," urged Marise, sitting up with energy. "We can, every
one of us, throw ourselves against it, argue with him, tell him that it
seems to us not only foolish, and exaggerated, and morbid, but conceited
as if he thought what _he_ did would count so very much. We can make him
feel that it would be sort of cheating the Company, after what they've
done for him; we can just mass all our personalities against it, use
moral suasion, get excited, work on his feelings . . . she has done that,
that cousin!"

"I wouldn't want to do that," said Neale quietly. "You can, if you think
best."

She recognized a familiar emergence of granite in his voice and aspect
and cried out on it passionately, "Now, _Neale_!"

He knew perfectly well what this meant, without further words from her.
They looked at each other, an unspoken battle going on with extreme
rapidity between them, over ground intimately familiar. In the middle of
this, she broke violently into words, quite sure that he would know at
which point she took it up. "You carry that idea to perfectly impossible
lengths, Neale. Don't you ever admit that we ought to try to make other
people act the way we think best, even when we _know_ we're right and
they're wrong?"

"Yes," admitted her husband, "I should think we were bound to. If we
ever _were_ s