The Brimming Cup

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

He wasted no time. "What has happened to you?" he demanded, peremptorily as by right to know, and with the inner certainty of over-riding it, whatever it was.

She did not seem tacitly or otherwise to deny his right to know, but she seemed to have no words for it, continuing to look at him silently, intently, with no hostility, with a sort of steady, wondering attention in her face, usually so sensitively changing. He felt a resentment at its quiet, at its lack of that instant responsiveness to his look which had given him such moments of exquisite pleasure, which had been her own, her wonderful gift to him. She was looking at him now as she might have looked at any one else, merely in order to see what was there.

Well, he would show her what was there! The will to conquer rose high and strong in him, with an element of fierceness it had not had before because no resistance had called it out. He did not show this, indeed only allowed it the smallest corner of his consciousness, keeping all the rest tautly on the alert for the first indication of an opening, for the first hint of where to throw his strength.

But standing in suspense on the alert was the last rôle he could long endure, and in a moment, when she did not answer, he took a step towards her, towering above her, his hands on her shoulders, pouring out with a hot sense of release all his longing into the cry, "Marise, Marise my own, what has happened to you?"

How he hated the quiet of her face! With what hungry impatience he watched to see it break. How surely he counted on its disappearance at his touch. For he had the certainty of his power to kindle her left intact from the last time he had seen her, tinder to his spark, helplessly played upon by his voice.

But now it was as though he had held a torch aloft into the green branches of a living tree. A twitch of surface agitation on her face and that was all.

And when she spoke, as she did at once, the sound of her voice was strange and alien to him. With an extreme directness, and with a deep sincerity of accent which, even to his ears, made his own impassioned outcry to her sound inflated and false, she said earnestly, "I don't believe I can tell you what has happened. I don't believe you could understand it."

He did not believe a word of this, but with his brilliant suppleness of mind he perceived that he was in the wrong key. She was not, for the moment, to be kindled to flame, she who miraculously was never the same. Perhaps it was the moment for a thrust of sheer power, straight at the obstacle, for of course he knew the obstacle.

"I know what has happened," he said, "without your telling me. Your husband has made a scene, and overborne you, and is trying to force you back into the hen-yard of domestic virtue. . . ." He changed his manner. He said in a low, beautiful, persuasive voice, his eyes deeply on her, sure of himself with that sureness that no one had ever resisted, "But you can never do that now, you bird-of-paradise! You would only . . ."

He was brought up short by a change in her. This time his words had had the power to move her face from the quiet he hated. It was suddenly alive with a strong emotion. But what emotion? He could not guess at its meaning, nor why she should step quickly away, shaking his hands from her shoulders, and looking at him sadly, her eyebrows drawn up as if in pain. He hung uncertain, daunted by his inability to read her face, feeling for the first time an instantly dismissed doubt of his mastery over her.