his eyes from her."

Marise was silent, startled by this shouting out of something she had
preferred not to formulate.

"Vincent, you see too much," said Mr. Welles resignedly. The phrase ran
from his tongue as though it were a familiar one.

Marise said slowly, "I've sometimes thought that Frank Warner did go to
the Powers' a good deal, but I haven't wanted to think anything more."

"What possible reason in the world have you for not wanting to?" asked
Marsh with the most authentic accent of vivid and astonished curiosity.

"What reason . . . ?" she repeated blankly.

He said dispassionately, "I don't like to hear _you_ make such a flat,
conventional, rubber-stamp comment. Why in the world shouldn't she love
a fine, ardent, _living_ man, better than that knotty, dead branch of a
husband? A beautiful woman and a living, strong, vital man, they belong
together. Whom God hath joined . . . Don't try to tell me that your
judgment is maimed by the Chinese shoes of outworn ideas, such as the
binding nature of a mediaeval ceremony. That doesn't marry anybody, and
you know it. If she's really married to her husband, all right. But if
she loves another man, and knows in her heart that she would live a
thousand times more fully, more deeply with him . . . why, she's _not_
married to her husband, and nothing can make her. You know that!"

Marise sprang at the chance to turn his own weapons of mockery against
him. "Upon my word, who's idealizing the Yankee mountaineer now?" she