Dorothy Canfield Fisher

“ Marise was so sensitive, so impressionable, so easily moved, so defenseless when her emotions were aroused. Hadn't he the right, the duty, he who knew her better than anyone else, to protect her against herself? Wasn't he deceiving himself by fantastic notions? It would be so easy to act the ardent, passionate young lover again . . . but when had he ever "acted" anything for Marise! No matter, no matter, this was life or death; what was a lie when life and death hung in the balance? He could play on her devotion to the children, throw all the weight of his personality, work on her emotions. ”

“ And in one of those silhouettes he recognized Marise Crittenden.
He turned away from the sight and struck his fist against the rough bark of the tree. What an insane waste and confusion ruled everywhere in human life! A woman like that to be squandered . . . an intelligence fine and supple, a talent penetrating and rare like hers for music, a strange personal beauty like that of no other woman, a depth one felt like mid-ocean, a capacity for fun like a child's and a vitality of personality, a power for passion that pulsed from her so that to touch her hand casually set one thrilling . ”

“ Marise saw everyone's eyes turn to the center of the room and looked back to the plant. The big pink bud was beginning visibly to swell.
A silence came into the room. No one coughed, or stirred, or scraped a chair-leg. It was as though a sound would have wounded the flower. All those human souls bowed themselves. Almost a light shone upon them . . . a phrase from Dante came to Marise's mind . . . "la mia menta fu percossa da un fulgore . . ."
With a quick involuntary turn she looked at Marsh, fearing his mockery of her, "quoting the Paradiso, about Vermont farmers!" ”

“ Marise was amazed to find that the hot sweet smell of the cocoa aroused in her a keen sensation of hunger. She drank eagerly, and taking in her hand the piece of bread and butter which Neale offered to her, she began to eat it with a child's appetite. She was not ashamed or self-conscious in showing this before Neale. One never needed to live up to any pose before Neale. His mere presence in the room brought you back, she thought, to a sense of reality. Sometimes if you had been particularly up in the air, it made you feel a little flat as she certainly did now. ”

“ Was she the woman who had felt forced into acquiescing when Vincent Marsh had said so boldly and violently, that she loved her husband no more, that he was nothing to her now? It seemed to her at this moment that it was a matter of the utmost unimportance whether she loved him or not; but she could not live without believing him. That was all. She could not live without that. Life would be too utterly base . . .
Neale nothing to her? She did not know what he was to her, but the mere possibility of losing her faith in him was like death. ”

“ Marise and 'Gene advanced, hand in hand, to meet the old clergyman and the little girl. They met in the middle, poised an instant on the top wave of rhythm and stepped back, every footfall, every movement, their very breathing, in time to the beat-beat-beat of the fiddle's air which filled the room as insistently as the odor of the pines.
Mrs. Powers nodded her white head to it and tapped her foot. Marsh had not ventured to remove his eyes from the weaving interplay of the dancers in his own set. Now, for an instant, he glanced beyond them into the next room. ”

“ Nothing else could cope with the depth of the valley, the highness and blackness of its mountain walls, and the steepness of the Eagle Rocks."
"I call that going some, 'noble rounded note'!" murmured Marsh, lifting his eyebrows with a visible effort and letting his eyes fall half shut, against the brilliance of the sunshine.
Marise laughed, and persisted. "Just because its called a steam-whistle, we won't hear its beauty and grandeur, till something else has been invented to take its place, and then we'll look back sentimentally and regret it." ”

“ Had there ever before been any man who refused to let the woman he loved weaken herself by the use of his strength? Had a man ever before held out his strong hand to a woman to help her forward, not to hold her fast?
Her life was her own. She stood in it, knowing it to be an impregnable fortress, knowing that from it she could now look abroad fearlessly and understandingly, knowing that from it she could look at things and men and the world and see what was there. From it she could, as if for the first time, look at Vincent Marsh when next she saw him ”

“ But oh, Neale, I won't want life on any other terms!"
She stopped, looking down at her hand in his. He tightened his clasp. His gaze on her darkened and deepened. "It's like sending me to get the apples of Hesperides," he said, looking older than she, curiously and suddenly older. "I want to say yes! It would be easy to say yes. Darling, darling Marise, you can't want it more than I! But the very intelligence that makes you want it, that makes me want it, shows me how mortally hard it would be! Think! To be loyal to what is deepest and most living in yourself . ”

“ As if there were not a thousand other forms of deep fulfilment in life. People who thought that, how narrow and cramped they seemed, and blinded to the bigness and variety of life! But then, of course, everybody hadn't had under his eyes a creature genuinely rich and various, like Marise, and hadn't seen how all children feasted on her charm like bees on honey, and how old people adored her, and how, just by being herself, she enriched and civilized every life that touched her, and made every place she lived in a home for the human spirit. ”

“ She looked without sympathy or admiration at Eugenia's perfection of aspect. "To look like that, she must care for looks more than anything else. What can she know about any real human feeling?" Marise asked herself, with an intolerance she could not mitigate.
And yet as she continued to peer at Eugenia through that dark cloud of tragedy, it seemed to her that Eugenia showed signs of some real human emotion. As she gazed at her in the crude brilliance of the gaudy morning sun, she saw for the first time signs of years in Eugenia's exquisite small face. ”

“ 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. "I wish dogs wouldn't take us so seriously. We don't know so much more than they, about anything." She thought, further, noticing the sweetness of the protecting look which Paul gave to Médor, "All animals love Paul, anyhow. Animals know more than humans about lots of things. ”

“ The little boy began silently to put on and lace up his shoes.
Marise was aware of a dimming of the light in the inner room of her consciousness, as though one window after another were being darkened. A hushed, mournful twilight fell in her heart. Melancholy came and sat down with her, black-robed. What could one feel except Melancholy at the sight of the world of humanity, poor world, war-ridden, broken in health, ruined in hope, the very nerves of action cut by the betrayal of its desperate efforts to be something more than base. ”

“ For the moment she could think of nothing else beyond the richness of that freedom. Why, here was the total fulfilment she had longed for. Here was the life more abundant, within, within her own heart, waiting for her!
The old clock in the hall behind her sounded four muffled strokes and, as if it had wakened her, Agnes stirred in her bed and cried out in a loud voice of terror, "Oh, come quick, Miss Marise! Come!"
Marise went through the hail and to her door, and saw the frightened old eyes glaring over the pulled-up sheet. "Oh . . . oh . . . it's you . . . I thought. . . . ”

“ Perhaps if he had been wakened by Elly he would drowse off again at once as she felt herself doing now, conscious sleepily and happily of Elly's dear tender limbs on one side of her and of Neale's dear strong body on the other.
The strong March wind chanted loudly outside in the leafless maple-boughs. As Marise felt her eyelids falling shut again it seemed to her, half-awake, half-asleep, that the wind was shouting out the refrain of an old song she had heard in her childhood, "There's room for all! There's room for all! ”

“ And then, fit to turn her brain, the forest drew aside and showed her another nightmare figure, a man, far away to her right, running down the steep incline that sloped up to the Rocks. A man running as she had been wishing she could run, a powerful, roughly dressed man, rapt in a passion of headlong flight, that cast him down the rough slope, over the rocks, through the brambles, as though his flight were part of an endless fall.
Marise stopped stock-still, shocked out of every sensation but the age-old woman's instinct of fear and concealment. ”

“ Now they saw the beauty before them, the vast plain, the mountains, the sea: harmonious, serene, ripe with maturity, evocative of all the centuries of conscious life which had unrolled themselves there.
"It's too beautiful to be real, isn't it?" murmured the girl, "and now, the peaceful way I feel this minute, I don't mind it's being so old that it makes you feel a midge in the sunshine with only an hour or two of life before you. What if you are, when it's life as we feel it now, such a flood of it, every instant brimming with it? ”

“ He might have been entirely alone in his shop at the mill.
Marise noted with envy how he gave all of himself to that momentary examination, entirely escaped from any awareness of that tyrannical self which in her own heart always clamored like a spoiled child for attention. The impersonal concentration of his look as he turned the metal about between those strong dusty hands, gave to his face the calm, freed expression not to be bought for any less price than a greater interest in one's work than in one's self. "They'll do," pronounced Neale. ”

“ Let her look at it with a mature woman's experienced divination of reality, let her look at it as it would be and see for herself if it would be enough. She was no girl whose ignorance rendered her incapable of judging until she had literally experienced. She was no bound-woman, bullied by the tyranny of an outgrown past, forced to revolt in order to attain the freedom without which no human decision can be taken. Neale's strong hand had opened the door to freedom and she could see what the bound-women could not . . . that freedom is not the end, but only the beginning. ”

“ Nothing gives one such self-confidence, she reflected, as the certainty of having the right sort of hat. How much better "chic" was than beauty!
With the hat still in her hand, her very eyes on it, she saw there before her, as plainly as though in a crystal ball, Marise's attitude as she had stood with Marsh that evening before at the far end of the garden. Her body drawn towards his, the poise of her head, all of her listening intently while he talked . . . one could see how he was dominating her. ”

“ It had been sweet to be a little girl, she thought wistfully, to have had no past, to know only the shining present of every day with no ominous, difficult future beyond it. Ineffably sweet too was the aroma of perfect trust in the strength and wisdom of grown-up people, which tinctured deep with certainty every profoundest layer of her consciousness. Ineffably sweet . . . and lost forever. There was no human being in the world as wise and strong as poor old Cousin Hetty had seemed to her then. ”

“ She recognized it . . . the habit of honesty of thought, not native to Marise's heart, but planted there by her relation with Neale's stark, plain integrity. Feeding unchecked on its own food, during the long years of her marriage it had grown insensibly stronger and stronger, till now, tyrant and master, with the irresistible strength of conscious power, it could quell with a look all the rest of her nature, rich in colored possibilities of seductive self-deceit, sweet illusions, lovely falsities. ”

“ Across the intervening space and beyond all those carelessly alive bodies, Marise's eyes caught the unmistakable aspect of death in the tiny creature lying there.
"Mother!" cried Elly, "his eyes look so! He can't get his breath. Mother!" Marise felt the child's agitation and alarm knock at her heart. She looked down helplessly at the dying creature. That tiny, tiny scrap of down-covered flesh to be alive, to contain the miracle and mystery of life, and now to be struggling, all alone, with the miracle and mystery of death! ”

“ How Marise could play!
When the last dull, dreary, beautiful note had vibrated into silence, Eugenia murmured, "Doesn't that always make you want to crawl under the sod and pull the daisies over you?"
"Ashes, ashes, not daisies," corrected Marsh, dreamily.
There was, thought Neale listening critically to their intonations, a voluptuous, perverse pleasure in despair which he found very distasteful. Despair was a real and honest and deadly emotion. Folks with appetites sated by having everything they wanted, oughtn't to use despair as a sort of condiment to perk up their jaded zest in life. ”

“ He smiled at her gently, a good, quiet smile, and looked away into the extravagant splendor of a row of peonies.
Marise felt an inexplicable happiness, clear and sunny like the light in the old garden. She sat down on the bench and fell into a more relaxed and restful pose than she had known for some time. What a sweet and gracious thing life could be after all! Could there be a lovelier place on earth than here among Cousin Hetty's flower-children. Dear old Cousin Hetty, with her wrinkled, stiff exterior, and those bright living eyes of hers. ”