Part Two - Heard From the Study

June 20.

From his desk in the inner room where he finally buckled down to those
estimates about the popple-wood casters, Neale could follow, more or
less closely, as his attention varied, the evening activities of the
household.

First there had been the clinking and laughter from the dining-room and
kitchen where Marise and the children cleared off the table and washed
the dishes. How sweet their voices sounded, all light and gay! Every
occasion for being with their mother was fun for the kids. How happy
Marise made them! And how they throve in that happiness like little
plants in the sunshine!

When you really looked at what went on about you, how funny and silly
lots of traditional ideas did seem. That notion, solemnly accepted by
the would-be sophisticated moderns, for instance, that a woman of beauty
and intelligence was being wasted unless she was engaged in being the
"emotional inspiration" of some man's life: which meant in plain
English, stimulating his sexual desire to that fever-heat which they
called impassioned living. 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. And Heaven knew she was, with all that, the real
emotional inspiration of a man's life, a man who loved her a thousand
times more than in his ignorant and passionate youth.