Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/464

 fences, especially if the change would mean making less money. Just think of all the natural-born carpenters and mechanics that fall by chance into professors' families, or millionaires' homes. They never get any chance in life. Just look at the hullaballo that was made about poor old Tolstoi's wanting the simplicity of a working-man's life. Just look at the fiendishly ingenious obstacles that are put in the way of any workingman's son who wants the culture and fineness and harmonious living that got so on Tolstoi's nerves. And look, even Tolstoi was just as bad as the rest. Because he happened to want simplicity and a hardy open life, didn't he start on the warpath to drive everybody else to it. Good Lord, why try to hold up one ideal as the only one for millions of men, who have a million various capacities and ideals and tastes? They'd enrich the world like a garden, with their lives, if public opinion only allowed them to be lived."

"Do you know Rabelais," asked Marise, "and his motto, Fay ce que vouldras? Everybody in his day thought it fearfully immoral."

"Oh, I suppose that every wise man since the beginning of the world has found it out in his way before now. But they're not allowed to tell the rest of us plain folks so we understand. Or maybe you don't understand anything till you find it out for yourself. I don't believe I do. Do you?"

"I'm sure," said Marise with a quiet bitterness in her tone that burned like a drop of acid in Neale's mind, "I'm sure that I personally haven't found out anything, nor do I understand anything whatever. Nor, till this minute did anybody ever suggest to me that there was really something worth while to find out. Nobody—nobody but you—ever dreamed of asking me to go on a quest to understand. That's why I—go on, go on with it. Why do you stop?"

But that day Neale had been too much startled by the glimpse of a somber discontent under her keen bright intelligence, and too much moved by her speaking of his bringing something different into her life to "go on."

He tried desperately to think of some way to ask her about it, to offer to help her, to implore her to open her heart as he