On the heels of this outcry, there glided in insinuatingly a soft-spoken crowd of tempting, seductive possibilities.  Marise was so sensitive, so impressionable, so easily moved, so defenseless when her emotions were aroused.  Hadn’t he the right, the duty, he who knew her better than anyone else, to protect her against herself?  Wasn’t he deceiving himself by fantastic notions?  It would be so easy to act the ardent, passionate young lover again . . . but when had he ever “acted” anything for Marise!  No matter, no matter, this was life or death; what was a lie when life and death hung in the balance?  He could play on her devotion to the children, throw all the weight of his personality, work on her emotions.  That was what people did to gain their point.  Everybody did it.  And he could win if he did.  He could hold her.

* * * * *

Like the solemn tolling of a great bell there rang, through all this hurried, despairing clutching at the endurable and lesser, a call to the great and intolerable.  The immensity of his love for Marise loomed up, far greater than he; and before that sacred thing he hung his head, and felt his heart breaking.

“No, that won’t do.  Not when it is Marise who is in question.  The best, the very best I can conceive is what I must give to Marise.  A cage could not hold her, not anything but her body, and to force her decision would be to make a cage.  No, I mustn’t use the children either.  They are hers as much as mine.  If all is not right between us, what would it avail them to be with us?  They must take what life brings them, like the rest of us.  If the years Marise and I have passed together, if what we have been to each other, and are to each other, if that is not enough, then nothing is enough.  That would be a trick to play on her . . . to use my knowledge of her vulnerable points to win.  That is not what I want.  What do I want?  I want Marise to be happy.”

He had advanced a step since the last time he had told himself this, for now he said it with a dreadful calm, his heart aching but not faltering.

But he could go no further.  There were limits to what he could endure.  He fell into a trance-like state of passivity, his body and mind exhausted.

As he lay thus, fallen and prostrate, there soared up out of a part of him that was neither mind nor body, but was nevertheless himself, something swift and beautiful and living, something great enough at last to measure its greatness with the immensity of his love for Marise.

What was it?

It was this . . . for a moment he had it all clear, as though he had died and it were something told him in another world . . . he did not want Marise for himself; he did not even want her to be happy; he wanted her to be herself, to be all that Marise could ever grow to be, he wanted her to attain her full stature so far as any human being could do this in this life.