The Brimming Cup

"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!"