r all about her with the perfume of young gaiety. "Is it
Miss Druid, or Mrs. Druid?" was all she would say.

She looked up at him, her eyes shining, and cried between her gusts of
laughter, as if astonished, "Why, I do believe we are going to be happy
together. I do believe it's going to be fun to live with you."

His appalled surprise that she had again fallen into the pit of
incredulity was, this time, only half humorous. "For God's sake, what
_did_ you think!"

She answered, reasonably, "Well, nobody ever is happy together, either
in books or out of them. Of all the million, million love-affairs that
have happened, does anybody ever claim any one to have been happy?"

His breath was taken away. He asked helplessly, "Well, why _are_ you
marrying me?"

She replied very seriously, "Because I can't help myself, dear Neale.
Isn't that the only reason you're marrying me?"

He looked at her long, his nostrils quivering a little, gave a short
exclamation which seemed to carry away all his impatience, and finally
said, quietly enough, "Why, yes, of course, if that's the way you want
to put it. You can say it in a thousand thousand different ways."

He added with a sudden fury, "And never one of them will come anywhere
near expressing it. Look here, Marise, I don't believe you have the
faintest, faintest idea how big this thing is. All these fool clever
ways of talking about it . . . they're just a screen set up in front of
it, to my mind. It's enough sight bigger than just you or me, or
happiness or unhappiness. It's the meaning of everything!"

She considered this thoughtfully. "I don't believe I really know what
you mean," she said, "or anyhow that I _feel_ what you mean. I have had
dreams sometimes, that I'm in something awfully big and irresistible
like a great river, flowing somewhere; but I've never felt it in waking
hours. I wish I could. It's lovely in dreams. You evidently do, even
awake."

He said, confidently, "You will, later on."

She ventured, "You mean, maybe, that I'm so shaken up by the little
surface waves, chopping back and forth, that I don't feel the big
current."

"It's there. Whether you feel it or not," he made final answer to her
doubt.

She murmured, "I wonder if there is anything in that silly,
old-fashioned notion that men are stronger than women, and that women
must lean on men's strength, to live?"

"Everybody's got to lean on his own strength, sooner or later," he told
her with