Marise sprang at the chance to turn his own weapons of mockery against him. "Upon my word, who's idealizing the Yankee mountaineer now?" she cried, laughing out as she spoke at the idea of her literal-minded neighbors dressed up in those trailing rhetorical robes. "I thought you said they were so dull and insensitive they could feel nothing but an interest in two-headed calves, and here they are, characters in an Italian opera. I only wish Nelly Powers were capable of understanding those grand languages of yours and then know what she thought of your idea of what's in her mind. And as for 'Gene's jealousy, I'll swear that it amounts to no more than a vague dislike for Frank Warner's 'all the time hanging around and gassin' instead of stickin' to work.' And you forget, in your fine modern clean-sweep, a few old-fashioned facts like the existence of three Powers children, dependent on their mother." "You're just fencing, not really talking," he answered imperturbably. "You can't pretend to be sincere in trying to pull that antimacassar home-and-mother stuff on me. Ask Bernard Shaw, ask Freud, ask Mrs. Gilman, how good it is for children's stronger, better selves, to live in the enervating, hot-house concentration on them of an unbalanced, undeveloped woman, who has let everything else in her personality atrophy except her morbid preoccupation with her own offspring. That's really the meaning of what's sentimentally called 'mothering.' Probably it would be the best thing in the world for the Powers children if their mother ran away with that fine broth of a lad." "But Nelly loves her children and they love her!" Marise brought this out abruptly, impulsively, and felt, as she heard the words, that they had a flat, naive sound, out of key with the general color of this talk, like a C Major chord introduced into Debussy nuances. "Not much she doesn't, nor they her. Any honest observer of life knows that the only sincere relation possible between the young and the old (after the babies are weaned) is hostility. We hated our elders, because they got in our way. And they'll hate us as soon as they get the strength to, because we'll be in their way. And we will hate them because they will want to push us off the scene. It's impossible to ignore the gulf. Most human tragedies come from trying to pretend it's not there." "Why, Mr. Welles," cried Marise again, "what do you say to such talk? Don't you find him perfectly preposterous?"