time, and drew her
close. She thought angrily, "He thinks it's just a fit of nerves I can
be soothed out of like a child," and pulled away from him.

He looked at her, his attentive, intelligent look, and let his arm drop.
And yet, although he was serious now, she was sure that he saw only that
the subject agitated her, and did not see any possibility that it might
touch them both, personally.

"I have to think whatever I'm convinced is true, whether it makes me
miserable or not, don't I?" he said gently. "And it does make me
miserable, of course. Who can help being miserable at the spectacle of
such rich possibilities as human life is full of, mismanaged and spoiled
and lost?"

"But, Neale, do you realize that people are thinking, books are being
written to prove that parents' love for their children is only
self-love, hypocritically disguised, and sometimes even sexual love
camouflaged; and that anybody is better for the children to be with than
their mother; and that married people, after the first flare-up of
passion is over, hate each other instead of loving?"

"I daresay there's a certain amount of truth in that, occasionally. It
would certainly explain some of the inexplicable things we all see
happen in family life," he remarked.

Marise started and cried out piercingly, "Neale, how can you say such
things to _me_!"

He looked at her keenly again, keenly and penetratingly, and said, "I'm
not one of those who think it inherent in the nature of women to take
abstract propositions personally always. But I do think they will have
to make a big effort to get themselves out of a mighty old acquired
habit of thinking every general observation is directed at them
personally."

She flashed out indignantly at him, "How can you help taking it
personally when it shakes the very foundations of our life?"

He was astonished enough at this to suit even her. His face showed the
most genuine amazed incapacity to understand her. "Shakes the . . . why,
Marise dear, what are you talking about? You don't have to believe about
_yourself_ all the generalizing guesses that people are writing down in
books, do you, if it contradicts your own experience? Just because you
read that lots of American men had flat-foot and were refused at the
recruiting station for that, you don't have to think your own feet flat,
do you? If you do think so, all you have to do is to start out and walk
on them, to know for sure they're all right. H