ed to be happy...
but one can't choose."

He went up to her. "No, one can't choose. And how can anyone give you
happiness who hasn't got it himself?" He took her hands, feeling how
large, muscular and voluntary they were, even as they melted in his
palms.

"My poor Coral, of what use can I ever be to you? What you need is to be
loved."

She drew back and gave him one of her straight strong glances: "No," she
said gallantly, "but just to love."

PART III

XXV

IN the persistent drizzle of a Paris winter morning Susy Lansing walked
back alone from the school at which she had just deposited the four
eldest Fulmers to the little house in Passy where, for the last two
months, she had been living with them.

She had on ready-made boots, an old waterproof and a last year's hat;
but none of these facts disturbed her, though she took no particular
pride in them. The truth was that she was too busy to think much about
them. Since she had assumed the charge of the Fulmer children, in the
absence of both their parents in Italy, she had had to pass through such
an arduous apprenticeship of motherhood that every moment of her waking
hours was packed with things to do at once, and other things to remember
to do later. There were only five Fulmers; but at times they were
like an army with banners, and their power of self-multiplication was
equalled only by the manner in which they could dwindle, vanish, grow
mute, and become as it were a single tumbled brown head bent over a book
in some corner of the house in which nobody would ever have thought of
hunting for them--and which, of course, were it the bonne's room in the
attic, or the subterranean closet where the trunks were kept, had been
singled out by them for that very reason.

These changes from ubiquity to invisibility would have seemed to Susy,
a few months earlier, one of the most maddening of many characteristics
not calculated to promote repose. But now she felt differently. She
had grown interested in her charges, and the search for a clue to their
methods, whether tribal or individual, was as exciting to her as the
development of a detective story.

What interested her most in the whole stirring business was the
discovery that they had a method. These little creatures, pitched upward
into experience on the tossing waves of their parents' agitated lives,
had managed to establish a rough-and-ready system of self-government.
Junie, the eldest (the one who al