struggle based on self-reliance and self-conquest. Neale “wanted her to be herself, to be all that Marise could ever grow to be, he wanted her to attain her full stature.” “Nothing is your own, if you haven’t made it so.” Marise wonders if her mother-love is what Marsh calls “inverted sensuality”; Neale says, “Look into your own heart and see for yourself.” He “longed for her sake to have her strike out into the deep,” he knew that peace could only come from “Marise’s acting with her own strength on her own decision.” He urges not outer but inner control--“as few umpires as possible.” In her conflict Marise sought “what was deepest and most living in her ...; that was what the voices were trying to cry her down from finding.” She longed to be “one with the great current”--Emerson’s “stream of power.” She discovers that she is being lured by “the conventional pose of revolt,” that separation from her children would not be true “growth and freedom, and generous expansion of the soul.” Like Milton and Emerson, she finally becomes free by discovering and obeying what is deepest within: “She was a free woman, free from something in her heart that was afraid. For the moment she could think of nothing else beyond the richness of that freedom. Why, here was the total fulfilment she had longed for. Here was the life more abundant, within, within her own heart, waiting for her!” Joyous in her centrality, poise and freedom, she sees Marsh as an “undeveloped and tyrannical soul, the cramped mind without experience or conception of breadth and freedom.” “How narrow and cramped,” and “blinded to the bigness and variety of life” seemed people who thought that “a woman of beauty and intelligence” was wasting her life “unless she was engaged in ... stimulating ... sexual desire.” Marise had the serene joy of her home, her beloved children and her understanding husband; she had the marvel of her music; and she had the surpassing wisdom to seek her happiness not in the miraculous but in the common--in the symbolic neighbourly gathering on the night of the blooming of the Cereus, that rite of beauty; in the calm strength of simple folk whom experience has made wise. And this woman, living out her “heritage, alive and rooted deep,” with her “vivid charm like an aureole of golden mist,” “felt slowly coming into her, like a tide of a great ocean,” the ineffable peace which comes from self-mastery, from the quest of what is most universally and nobly human. Calm and free, she was lifted “high, high above the smallness of life, up to a rich realm of security in joy.” IV