exclamation which seemed to carry away all his impatience, and finally
said, quietly enough, "Why, yes, of course, if that's the way you want
to put it. You can say it in a thousand thousand different ways."

He added with a sudden fury, "And never one of them will come anywhere
near expressing it. Look here, Marise, I don't believe you have the
faintest, faintest idea how big this thing is. All these fool clever
ways of talking about it . . . they're just a screen set up in front of
it, to my mind. It's enough sight bigger than just you or me, or
happiness or unhappiness. It's the meaning of everything!"

She considered this thoughtfully. "I don't believe I really know what
you mean," she said, "or anyhow that I _feel_ what you mean. I have had
dreams sometimes, that I'm in something awfully big and irresistible
like a great river, flowing somewhere; but I've never felt it in waking
hours. I wish I could. It's lovely in dreams. You evidently do, even
awake."

He said, confidently, "You will, later on."

She ventured, "You mean, maybe, that I'm so shaken up by the little
surface waves, chopping back and forth, that I don't feel the big
current."

"It's there. Whether you feel it or not," he made final answer to her
doubt.

She murmured, "I wonder if there is anything in that silly,
old-fashioned notion that men are stronger than women, and that women
must lean on men's strength, to live?"