s that did not
exist there. "Oh, we never have to consider that," she answered, not
finding a more accurate phrase. "There won't be time enough to do all
we'll try to do, all we'll have to do. There's living. That takes a lot
of time and energy. And I'll have the chorus as usual. I'm going to try
some Mendelssohn this year. The young people who have been singing for
five or six years are quite capable of the 'Elijah.' And then any of the
valley children who really want to, come to me for lessons, you know.
The people in North Ashley have asked me to start a chorus there this
year, too. And in the mill, Neale has a plan to try to get the men to
work out for themselves some standards of what concerns them especially,
what a day's work really is, at any given job, don't you know."

What an imbecile she was, she thought, to try to talk about such things
to Eugenia, who could not, in the nature of things, understand what she
was driving at. But apparently Eugenia had found something
understandable there, for she now said sharply, startled, "Won't that
mean less income for you?"

She did not say, "_Even_ less," but it was implied in the energy of her
accent.

Marise hesitated, brought up short by the solidity of the intangible
barrier between their two languages. There were phrases in her own
tongue which could not be translated into Eugenia's, because they
represented ideas not existing there. She finally said vaguely, "Oh
perhaps not."

Her pause had been enough for Eugenia to drop back into her own world.
She said thoughtfully, "I've half a notion to try going straight on
beyond Biskra, to the south, if I could find a caravan that would take
me. That would be something new. Biskra is so commonplace now that it
has been discovered and exploited." She went on, with a deep, wistful
note of plaintiveness in her voice, "But _every_thing's so commonplace
now!" and added, "There's Java. I've never been to Java."

It came over Marise with a shock of strangeness that this was the end of
Eugenia in her life. Somehow she knew, as though Eugenia had told her,
that she was never coming back again. As they stood there, so close
together, in the attitude of friends, they were so far apart that each
could scarcely recognize who the other was. Their paths which in youth
had lain so close to each other as to seem identical, how widely they
had been separated by a slight divergence of aim! Marise was struck by
her sudden perception of