cried, laughing out as she spoke at the idea of her literal-minded
neighbors dressed up in those trailing rhetorical robes. "I thought you
said they were so dull and insensitive they could feel nothing but an
interest in two-headed calves, and here they are, characters in an
Italian opera. I only wish Nelly Powers were capable of understanding
those grand languages of yours and then know what she thought of your
idea of what's in her mind. And as for 'Gene's jealousy, I'll swear that
it amounts to no more than a vague dislike for Frank Warner's 'all the
time hanging around and gassin' instead of stickin' to work.' And you
forget, in your fine modern clean-sweep, a few old-fashioned facts like
the existence of three Powers children, dependent on their mother."

"You're just fencing, not really talking," he answered imperturbably.
"You can't pretend to be sincere in trying to pull that antimacassar
home-and-mother stuff on me. Ask Bernard Shaw, ask Freud, ask Mrs.
Gilman, how good it is for children's stronger, better selves, to live
in the enervating, hot-house concentration on them of an unbalanced,
undeveloped woman, who has let everything else in her personality
atrophy except her morbid preoccupation with her own offspring. That's
really the meaning of what's sentimentally called 'mothering.' Probably
it would be the best thing in the world for the Powers children if
their mother ran away with that fine broth of a lad."

"But Nelly loves her children and they love her!" Marise brought this
out abruptly, impulsively, and felt, as she heard the words, that they
had a flat, naïve sound, out of key with the general color of this talk,
like a C Major chord introduced into Debussy nuances.

"Not much she doesn't, nor they her. Any honest observer of life knows
that the only sincere relation possible between the young and the old