in bed, she stopped her reading of
the new music for a moment to say to Neale, "You know those ideas that
other people are better for children than their parents are?"

"Yes," said Neale, laying down the baseball page of his newspaper,
instantly all there, looking at her intently.

"Well, I don't believe a word of it," said Marise.

"I should say it depended on which parents and on which children were
meant," advanced Neale guardedly.

Marise had at first an affectionate smile for this, and then a laugh.
She got up from the piano-stool and went to kiss him. He said with a
whimsical suspicion of this, "Why so?"

"Because you are so entirely you," she told him, and went back to
Scriabine.

III

September 22.

It was the half-hour of pause after lunch. The children played idly with
the fox-terrier and lounged on the steps of the side-porch, strong and
brown, living cups filled to the brim with life. Neale had pushed his
chair back from the table, lighted his pipe, and sat meditating.
Presently he put out his hand and laid it on Marise's, who had turned to
look down the sun-flooded valley.

It was high-noon, dreamy, entranced, all the world golden with the
magnificent weather as a holly-hock is golden with pollen. From the
brook came the living voice of the water, with the special note of brave
clarity it always had for brilliant noons.

It seemed to Marise that she too was all gold-powdered with the
magnificence of life, that in her heart there sang a clear living voice
that did not fear high-noons.

IV

October.

Would Vincent come back at all? Marise had wondered so often. Not
Vincent in the flesh; that last angry bewildered gesture had finality in
it. He had given her up then, totally. But would he come back to haunt
her in those inevitable moments of flat ebb-tide in life, when what
should be moist and living, withered and crisped in the merciless
drought of drudgery and routine? She feared it, frankly dreaded it at
first, and tried to think how to brace herself against it. But it was
not then that tie came, not when she was toiling with dishes to wash, or
vegetables to pare, or the endless care of the children's never-in-order
clothes. Instead she found in those moments, which had been arid before,
a curious new savor, a salt without which life would seem insipid,
something which gave her appetite for the rest. "This is all Tolstoyan
nonsense and sentimentality," she told herself mockingly, "the