The Brimming Cup

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

As Eugenia only looked at her, quietly, she ventured further, "You might really be happier, you know. There is a great deal of happiness in the right marriage." She had never said so much to Eugenia.

Eugenia let Marise's hand drop and with it, evidently, whatever intention she might have had of saying something difficult to express. Instead, she advanced with her fastidious, delicate note of irony, "I don't deny the happiness, if that sort of happiness is what one is after. But I think my appetite for it . . . that sort . . . is perhaps not quite robust enough to relish it."

Marise roused herself to try to put a light note of cheerfulness into this last conversation. "You mean that it seems to you like the coarsely heaped-up goodies set before a farmhand in a country kitchen . . . chicken and butter and honey and fruit and coffee, all good but so profuse and jumbled that they make you turn away?"

"I didn't give that definition of domestic life," corrected Eugenia, with a faint smile, "that's one of your fantasies."

"Well, it's true that you get life served up to you rather pell-mell, lots of it, take-it-as-it-comes," admitted Marise, "but for a gross nature like mine, once you've had that, you're lost. You know you'd starve to death on the delicate slice of toasted bread served on old china. You give up and fairly enjoy wallowing in the trough."

She had been struck by that unwonted look of fatigue on Eugenia's face, had tried to make her laugh, and now, with an effort, laughed with her. She had forgotten her passing notion that Eugenia had something special to say. What could she have? They had gone over that astonishing misconception of hers about the Powers woodlot, and she had quite made Marise understand how hopelessly incapable she was of distinguishing one business detail from another. There could be nothing else that Eugenia could wish to say.

"How in the world shall I get through the winter?" Eugenia now wondered aloud. "Biskra and the Sahara perhaps . . . if I could only get away from the hideous band of tourists. They say there are swarms of war-profiteers from Italy now, everywhere, low-class people with money for the first time." She added with a greater accent of wonder, "How in the world are you going to get through the winter?"

Marise was struck into momentary silence by the oddness of the idea. There were phrases in Eugenia's language which were literally non-translatable into hers, representing as they did ideas that did not exist there. "Oh, we never have to consider that," she answered, not finding a more accurate phrase. "There won't be time enough to do all we'll try to do, all we'll have to do. There's living. That takes a lot of time and energy. And I'll have the chorus as usual. I'm going to try some Mendelssohn this year. The young people who have been singing for five or six years are quite capable of the 'Elijah.' And then any of the valley children who really want to, come to me for lessons, you know. The people in North Ashley have asked me to start a chorus there this year, too. And in the mill, Neale has a plan to try to get the men to work out for themselves some standards of what concerns them especially, what a day's work really is, at any given job, don't you know."

What an imbecile she was, she thought, to try to talk about such things to Eugenia, who could not, in the nature of things, understand what she was driving at. But apparently Eugenia had found something understandable there, for she now said sharply, startled, "Won't that mean less income for you?"

She did not say, "Even less," but it was implied in the energy of her accent.