ng that, too, that all people are
made of the same stuff. Mostly I find them perfectly negligible, too
utterly without savor even to glance at. Once in a thousand years, it
seems to me, you come across a human being who's alive as you are, who
speaks your language, is your own kind, belongs to you. When you do,
good Lord! What a moment!"

He pronounced this in a perfectly impersonal tone, but something about
the quality of his voice made Marise flash a quick glance at him. His
eyes met hers with a sudden, bold deepening of their gaze. Marise's
first impulse was to be startled and displeased, but in an instant a
quick fear of being ridiculous had voiced itself and was saying to her,
"Don't be countrified. It's only that I've had no contact with
people-of-the-world for a year now. That's the sort of thing they get
their amusement from. It would make him laugh to have it resented."
Aloud she said, rather at random, "I usually go down once a season to
the city for a visit to this old friend of mine, and other friends
there. But this last winter I didn't get up the energy to do that."

"I should think," said Mr. Welles, "that last winter you'd have used up
all your energy on other things, from what Mrs. Powers tells me about
the big chorus you always lead here in winters."

"That does take up a lot of time," she admitted. "But it's a generator
of energy, leading a chorus is, not a spender of it."

"Oh, come!" protested Marsh. "You can't put that over on me. To do it as
I gather you do . . . heavens! You must pour out your energy and
personality as though you'd cut your arteries and let the red flood
come."

"You pour it out all right," she agreed, "but you get it back a thousand
times over." She spoke seriously, the topic was vital to her, her eyes
turned inward on a recollection. "It's amazing. It's enough to make a
mystic out of a granite boulder. I don't know how many times I've
dragged myself to a practice-evening dog-tired physically with work and
care of the children, stale morally, sure that I had nothing in me that
was profitable for any purpose, feeling that I'd do anything to be
allowed to stay at home, to doze on the couch and read a poor novel."
She paused, forgetting to whom she was speaking, forgetting she was not
alone, touched and stirred with a breath from those evenings.

"Well . . . ?" prompted Mr. Marsh. She wondered if she were mistaken in
thinking he sounded a little irritable.

"Well," she answ