"But, Neale, do you realize that people are thinking, books are being written to prove that parents' love for their children is only self-love, hypocritically disguised, and sometimes even sexual love camouflaged; and that anybody is better for the children to be with than their mother; and that married people, after the first flare-up of passion is over, hate each other instead of loving?"
"I daresay there's a certain amount of truth in that, occasionally. It would certainly explain some of the inexplicable things we all see happen in family life," he remarked.
Marise started and cried out piercingly, "Neale, how can you say such things to me!"
He looked at her keenly again, keenly and penetratingly, and said, "I'm not one of those who think it inherent in the nature of women to take abstract propositions personally always. But I do think they will have to make a big effort to get themselves out of a mighty old acquired habit of thinking every general observation is directed at them personally."
She flashed out indignantly at him, "How can you help taking it personally when it shakes the very foundations of our life?"
He was astonished enough at this to suit even her. His face showed the most genuine amazed incapacity to understand her. "Shakes the . . . why, Marise dear, what are you talking about? You don't have to believe about yourself all the generalizing guesses that people are writing down in books, do you, if it contradicts your own experience? Just because you read that lots of American men had flat-foot and were refused at the recruiting station for that, you don't have to think your own feet flat, do you? If you do think so, all you have to do is to start out and walk on them, to know for sure they're all right. Heavens and earth! People of our age, who have really lived, don't need somebody in a book to tell them what's happening to them. Don't you know whether you really love Elly and Mark and Paul? If you don't, I should think a few minutes' thought and recollection of the last ten years would tell you, all right. Don't you know whether we hate each other, you and I?"
Marise drew a long breath of relief. This was the sort of talk she wanted. She clutched at the strong hand which seemed at last held out to her. She did so want to be talked out of it all. "Oh good! then, Neale, you don't believe any of that sort of talk? You were only saying so for argument."
He withdrew the hand. "Yes, I do believe a good deal of as a general proposition. What I'm saying, what I'm always saying, dear, and trying my best to live, is that everybody must decide for himself when a general proposition applies to him, what to believe about his own life and its values. Nobody else can tell him."
She approached along another line. "But, Neale, that's all very well for you, because you have so much withstandingness in you. But for me, there are things so sacred, so intimate, so much a part of me, that only to have some rough hand laid on them, to have them pulled out and pawed over and thought about . . . it frightens me so, sets me in such a quiver! And they don't seem the same again. Aren't there things in life so high and delicate that they can't stand questioning?"
He considered this a long time, visibly putting all his intelligence on it. "I can't say, for you," he finally brought out. "You're so much finer and more sensitive than I. But I've never in all these years seen that your fineness and your sensitiveness make you any less strong in the last analysis. You suffer more, respond more to all the implications of things; but I don't see that there is any reason to think there's any inherent weakness in you that need make you afraid to look at facts."