"I was just tellin' you that there's going to be a big change over to our house. 'Gene, he told Nelly, as he was setting here waiting for you, how he was going to cut down the big pine one of these days, like she always wanted him to. You know, the one that shades the house so. 'Gene's grandfather planted it, and he's always set the greatest store by it. Used to say he'd just as soon cut his grandmother's throat as chop it down. But Nelly, she's all housekeeper and she never did like the musty way the shade makes our best room smell. I never thought to see the day 'Gene would give in to her about that. He's gi'n in to her about everything else though. Only last night he was tellin' her, he was going to take something out'n the savings-bank and buy her an organ for Addie to learn to play on, that Nelly always hankered after. Seems 'sthough he can't do enough for Nelly, don't it?"
Marise looked at her coldly, incapable of paying enough attention to her to make any comment on what she said. Let them cut down all the trees in the valley, and each other's throats into the bargain, if Neale had . . . if there had never been her Neale, the Neale she thought she had been living with, all these years.
Mrs. Powers had gone finally, and the house was silent at last, so silent that she could now hear quite clearly, as though Eugenia still sat there, what the sweet musical voice was saying over and over. Why had they gone away and left her alone to face this deadly peril which advanced on her step by step without mercy, time after time? Now there was nothing to do but to wait and stand it off.
She was sitting in the same chair, her umbrella still in her hand, waiting, when Agnes came in to say that she had lunch ready. She turned eyes of astonished anger and rebuke on her. "I don't want anything to eat," she said in so strange a voice that Agnes crept back to the kitchen, shuffling and scared.
She was still sitting there, looking fixedly before her, and frowning, when Agnes came to the door to say timidly that the gentleman had come about using his car to meet the train, and wanted to know if he could see Mrs. Crittenden.
Marise looked at her, frowning, and shook her head. But it was not until late that night that she understood the words that Agnes had spoken.
She was still sitting there, rigid, waiting, when Agnes brought in a lighted lamp, and Marise saw that evening had come. The light was extremely disagreeable to her eyes. She got up stiffly, and went outdoors to the porch, sitting down on the steps.
The stars were beginning to come out now. The sight of them suggested something painful, some impression that belonged to that other world that had existed before this day, before she had conceived the possibility that Neale might not be Neale, might never have been Neale, that there was no such thing for her as human integrity. Was it she who had leaned out from the window and felt herself despised by the height and vastness of the stars? From the height and vastness of her need, she looked down on them now, and found them nothing, mere pin-pricks in the sky, compared to this towering doubt of her, this moral need which shouted down all the mere matter on the earth and in the heavens above the earth. Something eternal was at stake now, the faith in righteousness of a human soul.