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"Well, it's true that you get life served up to you rather pell-mell, lots of it, take-it-as-it-comes," admitted Marise, "but for a gross nature like mine, once you've had that, you're lost. You know you'd starve to death on the delicate slice of toasted bread served on old china. You give up and fairly enjoy wallowing in the trough."
All that rattles in your ears, that keeps you from knowing what you really are . . ." Someone was hurrying down the walk towards them, hidden by the hedge. Marise could not have turned her head if her life had hung on the action. Vincent looked straight at her, straight and deep and strong into her eyes, and for an instant his burning lips were pressed on hers. The contact was terrible, momentous.
I suppose I think he's very foolish. But I must say it shows a pretty fine spirit. I take off my hat to his intention." "Oh yes, his intention . . ." conceded Marise. "He's an old saint, of course. Only he mustn't be allowed to ruin his life and break everybody's heart, even if he is a saint." "That's the way saints usually run their business, isn't it?" asked Neale.
If some chance for this offered . . . you never could tell when . . . a word might be . . . perhaps something to turn Marise from Neale long enough to . . . She cast this idea off with shame for its crudeness. What vulgar raw things would come into your head when you let your mind roam idly . . . like cheap melodrama . . .
Then the mountain-silence settled down about them calmly, and they could hear their own hearts beat, and knew the thoughts in their minds. As they went back to their battered Ford, Marise said thoughtfully, "Somehow I believe that it will be a long time before we see Eugenia again."
March 15, 1920. 8:30 A.M. Marise fitted little Mark's cap down over his ears and buttoned his blue reefer coat close to his throat. "Now you big children," she said, with an anxious accent, to Paul and Elly standing with their school-books done up in straps, "be sure to keep an eye on Mark at recess-time. Don't let him run and get all hot and then sit down in the wind without his coat.
Such an effort, such a fatigue lay before those children one tried to keep laughing, and then . . . Someone came in behind her, without knocking or ringing. People had been coming and going unannounced in that house all the day as though death had made it their own home. Agnes came to the door, Marise looked up and saw Nelly Powers standing in the door-way, the second time she had been there.
Eugenia found that instead of thrilling voluptuously, as she knew she ought, to the precious pain and bewilderment of one of the thwarted characters of James Joyce, she was, with a disconcerting and painful eagerness of her own, bringing up to mind the daunted silence Marise kept when they mentioned the fact that of course everybody nowadays knew that children are much better off in a big, numerous, robust group than in the nervous, tight isolation of family life; and that a really trained educator could look out for them much better than any mother, because he could let them alone as a mother never could.
"Give them light, give them welcome. Be quick!" Marise ducked down, loosened the fastenings of the trap-door, flung it back, and, leaning over the gap with a light in her hand, called down into the darkness, "Hola! Hola! La! la! loi! Come on, comrades, come on!" The caller obeyed instantly.
The little boy reached down lovingly, and patted the dog, sitting in a rigid attitude of expectancy by his side. As the child turned the light of his countenance on those adoring dog eyes, the animal broke from his tenseness into a wriggling fever of joy. "'Oh, my God, my dear little God!" quoted Marise to herself, watching uneasily the animal's ecstasy of worship.
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