own between the great brown
columns of their trunks, not a breath stirred. The thick-set,
myriad-leaved young maples held all their complicated delicately-edged
foliage motionless in perfect calm.

It was very still in the depths of Marise's complicated mind also,
although the wind stirred the surface. Yes, she knew what had happened
to her. She had seen it completely happen to three other human beings,
miraculously, unbelievably, certainly; had seen the babies who could
not tell light from dark, heat from cold, emerge by the mere process of
healthful living into keenly sensitive beings accurately alive to every
minutest variation of the visible world. It must be that like them she
had simply learned to tell moral light from dark, heat from cold, by the
mere process of healthful living. What happened to the child who at one
time could not grasp the multiplication table, and a few years later, if
only he were properly fed and cared for, had somehow so wholly changed,
although still the same, that he found his way lightly among geometric
conceptions, and only a few years after that was probing with expert
fingers at some unsolved problem of astronomy? He had grown up, that was
all. By calling the miracle a familiar name we veiled the marvel of it.
Insensibly to him, with no visible change from one day to the next, he
had acquired a totally different conception of the universe, a totally
different valuation of everything in life.

That was what had happened to her. She had grown up . . . why should not a
woman grow up to other valuations of things as well as her comrade in
life?

And it had happened to her as it did to the child, because someone
stronger than she had protected her while she was growing . . . not
protected from effort, as though one should try to protect the child
from learning his lessons. . . . Back there, such ages ago in Italy, in her
ignorant . . . how ignorant! . . . and frightened girlhood, she had begged
Neale, without knowing what she did, to help her grow up, to help her
save what was worth saving in her, to help her untangle from the
many-colored confusion of her nature what was best worth keeping. And
Neale had done it, had clung steadily to his divination of what was
strong in her, in spite of her clamor to him to let it go.

But Vincent had not grown up, was back there still in confusion, holding
desperately with all that terrific strength of his to what could not be
held, to what was impe