"I should think," said Mr. Welles, "that last winter you'd have used up all your energy on other things, from what Mrs. Powers tells me about the big chorus you always lead here in winters."
"That does take up a lot of time," she admitted. "But it's a generator of energy, leading a chorus is, not a spender of it."
"Oh, come!" protested Marsh. "You can't put that over on me. To do it as I gather you do . . . heavens! You must pour out your energy and personality as though you'd cut your arteries and let the red flood come."
"You pour it out all right," she agreed, "but you get it back a thousand times over." She spoke seriously, the topic was vital to her, her eyes turned inward on a recollection. "It's amazing. It's enough to make a mystic out of a granite boulder. I don't know how many times I've dragged myself to a practice-evening dog-tired physically with work and care of the children, stale morally, sure that I had nothing in me that was profitable for any purpose, feeling that I'd do anything to be allowed to stay at home, to doze on the couch and read a poor novel." She paused, forgetting to whom she was speaking, forgetting she was not alone, touched and stirred with a breath from those evenings.
"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."