ruck down
any guard Marise had been able to put up. They cried her down as a
traitor to the fullness of life, those voices, shouting her down with
all the unquestioned authority she had encountered so many times on that
terribly vital thing, the printed page; they clashed in their fury and
all but drowned each other out. Only disconnected words reached her, but
she recognized the well-known sentences from which they came . . .
"puritanism . . . abundance of personality . . . freedom of
development . . . nothing else vital in human existence . . .
prudishness . . . conventionality . . . our only possible contact with
the life-purpose . . . with the end of passion life declines and dies."

The first onslaught took Marise's breath, as though a literal storm had
burst around her. She was shaken as she had been shaken so many times
before. She lost her hold on her staff . . . _what had that staff been?_

At the thought, the master-words came to her mind again; and all fell
quiet and in a great hush waited on her advance. Neale had said, "What
is deepest and most living in _you_." Well, what _was_ deepest and most
living in her? That was what she was trying to find out. That was what
those voices were trying to cry her down from finding.

For the first time in all her life, she drew an inspiration from Neale's
resistance to opposition, knew something of the joy of battle. What
right had those people to cry her down? She would not submit to it.

She would go back to the place where she had been set upon by other
people's voices, other people's thoughts, and she would go on steadily,
thinking her own.

She had been thinking that there _was_ the same displeasure and distaste
as when she had thought of returning to her literal childhood, when she
set herself fully to conceive what it would be to cramp herself and
simplify her complex interests and affections back to the narrow limits
of passion, which like her play with dolls had been only a foreshadowing
of something greater to come.

She spoke it out boldly now, and was amazed that not one of the
clamorous voices dared resist the authenticity of her statement. But
after all, how would they dare? This was what she had found in her own
heart, what they had not been able, for all their clamor, to prevent her
from seeing. She had been strong enough to beat them, to stand out
against them, to say that she saw what she really did see, and felt what
she really did feel. She did