"Well . . . ?" prompted Mr. Marsh. She wondered if she were mistaken in
thinking he sounded a little irritable.
"Well," she answered, "it has not failed a single time. I have never
come back otherwise than stronger, and rested, the fatigue and staleness
all gone, buried deep in something living." She had a moment of
self-consciousness here, was afraid that she had been carried away to
seem high-flown or pretentious, and added hastily and humorously, "You
mustn't think that it's because I'm making anything wonderful out of my
chorus of country boys and girls and their fathers and mothers. It's no
notable success that puts wings to my feet as I come home from that
work. It's only the music, the hearty satisfying singing-out, by
ordinary people, of what too often lies withering in their hearts."
She was aware that she was speaking not to sympathizers. Mr. Welles
looked vague, evidently had no idea what she meant. Mr. Marsh's face
looked closed tight, as though he would not open to let in a word of
what she was saying. He almost looked hostile. Why should he? When she
stopped, a little abashed at having been carried along by her feelings,
Mr. Marsh put in lightly, with no attempt at transition, "All that's
very well. But you can't make me believe that by choice you live up her
all the year around. You must nearly perish away with homesickness for
the big world, you who so evidently belong in it."
"Where is the big world?" she challenged him, laughing. "When you're
young you want to go all round the globe to look for it. And when you've
gone, don't you find that your world everywhere is about as big as you
are?"
Mr. Marsh eyed her hard, and shook his head, with a little scornful
downward thrust of the corners of his mouth, as though he were an augur
who refused to lend himself to the traditional necessity to keep up the
appearance of believing in an exploded religion. "You know where the
big world is," he said firmly. "It's where there are only people who
don't have to work, who have plenty of money and brains and beautiful
possessions and gracious ways of living, and few moral scruples." He
defined it with a sovereign disregard for softening phrases.
She opposed to this a meditative, "Oh, I suppose the real reason why I
go less and less to New York, is that it doesn't interest me as it used
to. Human significance is what makes interest for me, and when you're
used to looking deep into human lives out of a complete knowledge of
them as we do up here, it's very tantalizing and tormenting and after a
while gets boring, the superficial, incoherent glimpses you get in such
a smooth, glib-tongued circle as the people I happen to know in New
York. It's like trying to read something in a language of which you know
only a few words, and having the book shown to you by jerks at that!"