r with
traditional complaints about the overstepping of traditional bounds, how
she could have overwhelmed it, drowned out its feeble old voice, with
eloquent appeals for the right to growth, to freedom, to the generous
expansion of the soul, of the personality, which Vincent Marsh could
give. But honesty only asked her neutrally, "Is it really growth and
freedom, and generous expansion of the soul?" Poor Marise felt her arms
fall to her side, piteous and defenseless. No, it was not.

It was with the flatness of accent which she hated, which was so hard
for her, that she made the admission. It was physical excitement,--that
was what it was. Physical excitement, that was what Vincent Marsh could
give her which Neale no longer could. . . . That and great ease of life,
which Neale never would. There was a pause in which she shivered,
humiliated. She added lamely to this, a guessed-at possibility for
aesthetic sympathy and understanding, perhaps more than Neale could . . .
and broke off with a qualm of sickness. How horrid this was! How it
offended a deep sense of personal dignity and decency! How infinitely
more beautiful and gracious those rolling clouds of vagueness and
impulsive illusion!

But at least, when it had extracted the plain, bare statement which it
had hunted down through the many-recessed corners of her heart, that
stern sense of reality let her alone. She no longer felt like a beetle
impaled on a pin. She was free now to move as she liked and look
unmolested at what she pleased. Honesty had no more power over her than
to make sure she saw what she was pretending to look at.

But at what a diminished pile she had now to look, tarnished and faded
like the once-loved bits of bright-colored silk and paper. She felt
robbed and cried out in a pain which seemed to her to come from her very
heart, that something living and vital and precious to her had been
killed by that rough handling. But one warning look from the clear eyes
of honesty forced her, lamenting, to give up even this. If it had been
living and precious and vital to her, it would have survived anything
that honesty could have done to it.

But something had survived, something to be reckoned with, something
which no tyrant, overbearing honesty could put out of her life . . . the
possibility for being carried away in the deep full current of passion,
fed by all the multitudinous streams of ripened personality. If that
was all that was left, was not