The Brimming Cup

He asked her gravely, "Don't you love me? Don't you think that I love

you?"

She looked at him piteously, wincing, bracing herself with an effort to

be brave. "I must try to be as honest as I want you to be. Yes, I love

you, Neale, with all my heart a thousand times more than I ever dreamed

I could love anybody. But how do I know that I'm not somehow fooling

myself: but that maybe all that huge unconscious inheritance from all my

miserable ancestors hasn't got me, somehow, and you too? How do I know

that I'm not being fooled by Nature and fooling you with fine words?"

She hesitated, probing deep into her heart, and brought out now, like a

great and unexpected treasure, "But, Neale, listen! I don't think that

about you! I don't believe you're being fooled. Why, I believe in you

more than in myself!" She was amazed at this and radiant.

Then she asked him, "Neale, how do you manage about all this? What do

you feel about all the capacity for being low and bad, that everybody

has? Aren't you afraid that they'll get the best of us, inevitably,

unless we let ourselves get so dull, and second-rate and passive, that

we can't even be bad? Are you afraid of being fooled? Do you believe in

yourself at all?"

He was silent for some time, his eyes steadily fixed on some invisible

realm. When he spoke it was with a firm, natural, unshaken accent. "Why,

yes, I think it very likely that I am being fooled all the time. But I

don't think it matters the least bit in the world beside the fact that I

love you. That's big enough to overtop everything else."

He raised his voice and spoke out boldly to the undefined specter in her

mind. "And if it's the mating instinct you mean, that may be fooling

both of us, because of our youth and bodily health . . . good heavens!

Isn't our love deep enough to absorb that a million times over, like the

water of a little brook flowing into the sea? Do you think that, which

is only a little trickle and a harmless and natural and healthy little

trickle, could unsalt the great ocean of its savor? Why, Marise, all

that you're so afraid of, all that they've made you so afraid of, . . .

it's like the little surface waves . . . well, call it the big storm waves

if you want to . . . but nothing at all, the biggest of them, compared to

the stillness in the depths of the sea. Why, I love you! Do I believe in

myself? Of course I believe in myself, because I have you."