Part Four - The Fall of the Big Pine

August 2.

I

When Marise reached the place on the wood-road where she had had that
last talk with Vincent Marsh, she stopped, postponing for a moment the
errand to the Powers which she had so eagerly undertaken. She stood
there, looking up into the far green tops of the pines, seeing again
that strange, angry, bewildered gesture with which he had renounced
trying to make anything out of her, and had turned away.

It remained with her, constantly, as the symbol of what had happened,
and she looked at it gravely and understandingly. Then, very swiftly,
she saw again that passing aspect of his which had so terribly
frightened her, felt again the fear that he might be really suffering,
that she might really have done a hurt to another human being.

This brought her a momentary return of the agitation it had caused in
her that day, and she sat down abruptly on a tree-trunk, her knees
trembling, her hands cold.

That fear had come as so totally unexpected a possibility, something
which his every aspect and tone and word up to then had seemed to
contradict. Strange, how unmoved he had left her, till that moment!
Strange the impression of him, that first time after she had known
herself strong enough to stand up and be herself, not the responsive
instrument played on by every passing impression. Strange, how instantly
he had felt that, and how passionate had been his resentment of her
standing up to be herself, her being a grown woman, a human being, and
not a flower to be plucked. How he had hated it, and alas! how
lamentable his hatred of it had made him appear. What a blow he had
dealt to her conception of him by his instant assumption that a change
in her could only mean that Neale had been bullying her. It had been
hard to see him so far away and diminished as that had made him seem,
so entirely outside her world. It had dealt a back-hand blow to her own
self-esteem to have him seem vulgar.