"There's a good deal to be said about all that, that's pretty horrid and perfectly true," remarked Neale casually. He tilted his hat further over his eyes and leaned back, propping himself on one elbow.
"Neale!" she protested, shocked and repelled. She had hoped for something very different from Neale. But she thought, in a momentary exasperation with him, she might have known she would not get it. He always took everything so abstractedly, so impersonally.
"I don't see any use in pretending there's not," he advanced with a reasonable, considering air. "I don't see that intimate human relationships are in any more of a mess than other human relations. International ones, for instance, just now. But they certainly are in considerable of a mess, in a great many cases. It is evident that lots of times they're managed all wrong."
Marise was so acutely disappointed that she felt a quavering ache in her throat, and kept silence for a moment. So this was what she had looked forward to, as a help. What was Neale there for, if not for her to lean against, to protect her, to be a defending wall about her? He was so strong and so clearheaded, he could be such a wall if he chose. How stern and hard he was, the core of him!
"Neale," she said after a moment, "I wonder if you even know what things are being said about what we've always believed in . . . motherhood for instance, and marriage?"
She had been unable to keep the quaver out of her voice, and at the sound of it, he sat up instantly, astonished, solicitous, tender. "Why, darling, what's the matter?" he said again, moving closer to her, bending over her.
"How can you think such things without their making you perfectly miserable, without making you want to go straight and cut your throat?" she cried out on his callousness.
He put his arm about her again, not absently this time, and drew her close. She thought angrily, "He thinks it's just a fit of nerves I can be soothed out of like a child," and pulled away from him.
He looked at her, his attentive, intelligent look, and let his arm drop. And yet, although he was serious now, she was sure that he saw only that the subject agitated her, and did not see any possibility that it might touch them both, personally.
"I have to think whatever I'm convinced is true, whether it makes me miserable or not, don't I?" he said gently. "And it does make me miserable, of course. Who can help being miserable at the spectacle of such rich possibilities as human life is full of, mismanaged and spoiled and lost?"