"Oh, thank you, Nelly, that's very kind and thoughtful," said Marise. As she spoke and looked at the splendid, enigmatic woman standing there, the richness of her vitality vibrating about her, she saw again the nightmare vision of 'Gene and heard the terrible breathing that had resounded in the Eagle Rock woods. She was overwhelmed, as so often before in her life, by an amazement at the astounding difference between the aspect of things and what they really were. She had never entirely outgrown the wildness of surprise which this always brought to her. She and Nelly, looking at each other so calmly, and speaking of hot biscuits! She listened as though it were an ironically incongruous speech in a play to Agnes' conscientious country attempt to make conversation with the caller, "Hot today, ain't it? Yesterday's storm didn't seem to do much good." And to Nelly's answer on the same note, "Yes, but it's good for the corn to have it hot. 'Gene's been out cultivating his, all day long." "Ah, not all day! Not all day!" Marise kept the thought to herself. She had a vision of the man goaded beyond endurance, leaving his horses plodding in the row, while he fled blindly, to escape the unescapable. An old resentment, centuries and ages older than she was, a primaeval heritage from the past, flamed up unexpectedly in her heart. _There_ was a man, she thought, who had kept the capacity really to love his wife; passionately to suffer; whose cold intelligence had not chilled down to . . ." "Well, I guess I must be going now," said Nelly in the speech of the valley. She went away through the side-door, opening and shutting it with meticulous care, so that it would not make a sound. . . . As though a sound could reach Cousin Hetty now! "I don't like her biscuits," said Agnes. "She always puts too much sody in." She added, in what was evidently the expression of an old dislike, "And don't she look a fool, a great hulking critter like her, wearing such shoes, teeterin' along on them heels." "Oh well," said Marise, vaguely, "it's her idea of how to look pretty." "They must cost an awful sight too," Agnes went on, scoldingly, "laced halfway up her leg that way. And the Powerses as poor as Job's turkey. The money she puts into them shoes'd do 'em enough sight more good if 'twas saved up and put into a manure spreader, I call it."