my impressions when, a month later, in the soft violet of an August evening, I came upon Ann and Shaw on the platform of the little railroad-station fifty miles down the valley, whither I had been sent to meet them in person by a scrupulous wife. They were so exactly, my impressions, what I had imagined they would be. There are no eyes as sharp as those of the not too welcoming host. These two, Ann and Shaw, were so sure of themselves; so impeccable. One was aware how much they felt they were bringing delicate perceptions, civilized reactions, into an uncouth and to be patronized country. And all about them, you see, was this still, unending twilight, like eternity, and, to the east, the pregnant shadow of immense black hills. They stood in the light of a station lamp, their baggage piled around them, Ann slim and pale in her black clothes, very aureate, and her companion short, bulbous, fashionable. He called me "old man" on the score of an acquaintanceship long since discontinued, and Ann, between almost every sentence, laughed the disconnected, unreasonable laughter of her kind. I put them to bed with a grim satisfaction in the notorious discomforts of the local hotel. heroically altruistic acts performed, Martha proceeded, with the dryness that conceals a quick and kindly heart, to amplify her reasons for so doing. They were obvious reasons. Ann was too young, too much alone, too lovely to be cast suddenly upon a careless world; recklessness had been her habit. We were her nearest of kin; her only near relatives, in fact, for it was impossible to count as a relative her satyr-like father-in-law. Clearly it was our duty to offer her, here in this quiet, healing land, opportunity to regain some degree of poise; perhaps, although this was highly problematical, even to achieve a new and steadying perspective. You perceive we were idealists of sorts. People who love beyond measure certain countries are likely to be. They have immense faith in their curative powers-in the wide quality of the sea; the soaring quality of mountains. But we were not altogether idealists. Sturtevant Shaw was our concession to worldliness. All her life Ann, we knew, had been used to the attendance of the male-a sort of single-file triumphal procession; possibly a dim racial compulsion for adornment balked in the more primitive satisfactions of conch-shells and slaves. At all events, since marriage-and we had little doubt that Ann, in her own especial way, had Wide countries, wild countries, seem to loved her husband-had not allayed this have an excellent sense of dramatic fitthirst, there was little hope that widow- ness; they rain upon one when rain will hood would prove more effective. In make for history; they snow when blizAnn's social environment the mere pres- zards will heap up a story of adventure; ence of an habitual love was seldom they are beautiful when beauty is the imallowed to interfere with the far more pression desired; and the next day was exciting pastime of falling in love. An beautiful beyond compare. There was a innocent enough pastime, no doubt-cer- fine sense of gold and blue and scintillatainly so we imagined in the case of Ann tion. With us went the cool sound of -but a pastime that none the less was mountain streams, the warm scent of firs a habit. And Sturtevant Shaw, picked under a summer sun. Our way led up over from a visioned line of vacuous faces and a divide and then down into the valley bedebonair figures, seemed likely to be the yond. In upland meadows Indian paintleast actively offensive figure of all; the brush flamed amidst the blue smoke of most likely to supply Ann with the neces- lupin. But apparently, as yet, my guests sary piquancy devoid of tactless inter- were not prepared to concentrate their ference with a sorrow newly acquired. minds upon this gorgeousness of scenery. Besides, as a mere practical matter of It was as if they had brought with them a self-protection, we needed some one to bag of unfinished conversational odds and take Ann off our hands. The logical chain ends from which they busily drew forth was complete. The personal question of embroidered personalities and scandals, whether we ourselves wanted Ann did not worked upon them, put them back, and enter into it at all. drew forth others. There was about this an atmosphere of duty as much as one of I wish I could accurately convey to you pleasure. My elevation of soul suffered a relapse. Even when we had reached the summit and had come out of the climbing forests to a wind-swept place where the valley rose to meet us, staccato enthusiasm for matters and people far distant did not abate. Through the distance-smoothed gray and green of the plain ran the ribbon of the river, and beyond, range upon range, blue in the August haze, was a tumultuous loveliness of further-encircling hills. It was altogether heart-stopping. To be sure. "By Jove! How fine!" said Shaw with the evident intention of drawing me, in the front seat, into the conversation. But he seemed unable to maintain this temporary reversion to the traditions of a gentler generation, in which it was considered necessary not to forget altogether one's host; and as for Ann, she had the directness of a more primitive sex. At the moment she was interested in something that had happened at Newport two years before. And so we drove down the hill and so by dusk came to the ranch. Along the rim of the western hills the sun had left a band of gold, and up to the doors of the ranch-house had crept the translucent blue haze of the evening. Here and there a window radiated yellow light, and through the quiet atmosphere, layer upon layer, the approaching night was folding over us the mountain chill. It was very silent, except for the murmuring of the river and the creaking of leather as the tired horses shook their harness. I was totally unprepared for the unexpected gesture on the part of Ann. Shaw had descended from the wagon with the meticulous movements of an overfed and wearied man and had greeted Martha with his usual soft patronization, but Ann, when she reached the ground, did not at once follow him. Instead, she stood for a moment erect and very still, her face turned to the silhouette of the mountains, her head thrown back a trifle, as if she was tasting the air. At first I did not particularly notice her, and then I was suddenly struck by something in her attitude that suggested the calm delight of a swimmer who, coming to the surface, floats in the stillness of twilight water a quietness, a concentration very foreign to her. But the mood passed, and she turned and ran up to Martha and kissed her. The three of them went into the house. A moment afterward I heard Ann's high, nasal, thoughtless laughter. But I was not altogether unmoved. As I took the team down to the barns and unharnessed them I found myself wondering about Ann. Her laugh, however, still ringing in my ears, seemed to answer me. If there was in her some small seed worth cultivating, it must be a very small seed, indeed. Distaste was the reaction that at the moment followed. I was not a picture of the perfect host. When I went back to the house, Ann, sprawled out, with a more than ordinarily altruistic display of slim, silk-clad leg and ankle, in a big chair before the fire, was complaining, with the over-punctuated and over-emphasized diction that, with her kind, passes for humor, to Martha of the hardships of the journey. And this was my impression of Ann for the first two weeks of her stay; an impression overlaying, complementing the not particularly favorable one I already had of her. This high-voiced, drawling, hyperbolized habit of conversation! This affected habit of resentment toward unaccustomed surroundings! This attitude of the very opulent that nature should in some way or other realize, subscribe to their exceptional position! As if mountains, that is, were venerable, if slightly privileged, butlers. ... During August in a cattle country, unless there is hay to be put up, a man has comparatively little to do, and I found myself acting as guide to Ann and Shaw. I took them long trips on horseback, I picnicked with them, fished, climbed through the belt of heavy timber that clothed the lower slopes of the hills. Intimacy such as this necessitates eventual hatred or else liking. Mere toleration is impossible. And, curiously enough, it was Shaw whom I began to like. He was not charming; there was something about his sibilant, stuttering name that fitted his bulky, stuttering personality; but he was not the aggressive fool I had thought him. In reality there are probably few aggressive fools. Shaw was a meek man suffering from shyness; a meek man with a pathetic and unexplainable interest in mediæval art. He was even puzzled by his position and reason in the world, carrying with him a dim perception that his wealth and idleness were somehow adventitious, not quite to be taken for granted. One was reminded of a nearsighted, harmless bee blundered into an entangling web. And underneath his layers of ineptness I discovered one altogether decisive quality, he was entirely, splendidly, self-effacingly in love with Ann. He carried it like a sword beneath a cloak. I think the uncertainty this disclosure produced within me, the dislocation of my self-assurance, had largely to do with a change that at this time took place in my attitude toward Ann. If I had been so utterly wrong in one instance, there was a chance that I might be wrong in another. At all events, my mind, beginning to seal itself tight, opened ever so slightly to the possibility of new impressions. And then, unexpectedly, here was Shaw breaking his usual silence in regard to subjective matters; breaking it, for him, with startling lucidity. The immediate cause was, I think, a complaint on my part of Ann's habit of linking in the same breath sunsets and divorce; a disillusioning habit; a habit that frequently gave one the feeling of being pushed from a cliff into a quagmire. Shaw and I were riding home together into the gathering darkness, and I came to myself, as it were, to find him trying, intently, to convince me of something. "No-!" he stammered. "Not that! No! I don't know-it's hard to explain." His eyes sought the horizon in his effort to clarify his thoughts. "I wish I could make Ann clear to people," he continued. "Y' see, I've known her for twenty years -ever since she was a youngster." He laughed embarrassedly. Sometimes," he said, "I feel more like a father to her than anything else. You believe that, don't you?" "Yes," I answered, "I do." I hastened. to relieve any misconception on his part. "I am not criticising Ann particularly," I added; "I am merely wondering about her type, that's all. It's a prevalent type. It's about three-fourths of our so-called upper class. They're like bright-winged feverish and strident and apparently fortuitous. What makes them; what are they after?" He looked taken aback by this sudden flood of psychologic questioning. "I don't know what makes them," he answered at length; "bad conditions, I suppose. But I dare say even grasshoppers have some purpose at the back of their actions. And these people are only trying in their untrained way to find the same few fundamental things that other people, better trained, know how to go after directly. I'm a grasshopper myself, you know." I found myself voluble with the pentup irritation of a fortnight. "How the devil," I exclaimed, bringing my fist down on the horn of my saddle, can a woman who has been through what Ann has been through still remain what Ann is? Can you explain it? I think in place of the old virginal attitude about the body that used to be the fashion there's come a new perverted virginal frame of mind-not about sex! Good Lord, no!-but about life as it really is. A refusal to accept its poignancy; a desire to skim across its surface as if it were the thin edge of lava above a volcano. Was Ann in the least in love with Alastair ?" He nodded his head gravely. "Oh, yes," he answered, "greatly." "I don't believe it," I rejoined. "Not for a moment. Ann and women like her are dried pomegranates." He seemed shocked, but he was willing to admit that my remarks were, after all, meant as general ones. "You don't know Ann," he said at length doggedly. "I don't know her myself." He straightened up in his saddle and looked at me with an intent, brooding look. "Ann's changed, you know. Ann never was quite as feverish as she is now. Sometimes I think she must be afraid of something." "Afraid?" "Yes." "Of what?" Inspiration deserted him. "I don't know," he said lamely; "I often wonder. But people do cover up fear with words, don't they? She's so determinedly hard, isn't she? As if she was afraid to let herself go; as if she was anxious to hang on that she knows." He lit a cigarette with fat, too soft hands that trembled a little as he did so. "You don't get Ann," he concluded. "None of us do. We don't get any one ever but very clever, expressive people, and then we usually get them wrong. Nobody's a fool to themselves. And almost everybody over twenty-five's suffering like hell about something-even when they don't clearly realize it themselves." Extraordinary, wasn't it? It set one to thinking why it is usually the disjointed, careless people who in the end achieve the kindliest, truest philosophy. But I was not to any extent convinced. One wouldn't be so suddenly. I merely found myself studying Ann more closely. There were about her certain obvious things worth studying. Her mouth, for instance. I recollected that on previous occasions this mouth of Ann's had puzzled me-it was a lovely mouth, thin, red, with the hint of a curve to one corner of it; apparently an adventitious mouth; a mouth much too likely to disarm criticism. I congratulated myself, as I again recollected having done several times in the past, upon being proof against most forms of purely extrinsic pulchritude. Ann sat opposite me at meal-times, and at supper, beneath the descending light of candles under red shades, with which Martha had insisted upon decking the table of a Wyoming ranch-house, I had particularly excellent opportunity to observe the lower half of Ann's face; the lower half, with that mouth striking upon the senses like the single note of a sudden bell on a warm afternoon. One could not but remark, could not but be consistently irritated at the discrepancy between its sweet poignancy and the usual words that fell from it. There seemed here a striking instance of the lavish carelessness of nature. I resented this lavish carelessness of nature; resented it increasingly; quite unlooked for, Ann heightened my perplexity. The incident was like the opening and closing of a lantern shutter in a dark room. Upon a certain night Ann came to me with a book in her hand. Every one else was, I think, in bed. I was reading by the fire in the living-room. The great room, log-walled, hung with skins, was very quiet and softly illumined. In the room beyond I heard Ann rummaging amongst the shelves of our disassorted library, and presently she was by my side, leaning over my chair. "Do you think this is true?" she asked. I looked down casually, but not without some interest, for this was a new and quiet tone of voice on her part. My faint interest turned abruptly to astonishment; she was holding out before me the psalms. You can imagine the incongruity of Ann holding out the psalms! Thirty years ago the Anns of the world would have known the psalms by heart, but not nowadays. "Do you think this is true?" she insisted. "I had forgotten all about it." I read: "Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? "If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. "If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; And this?" She indicated a preceding paragraph with her finger. "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it." I twisted about in my chair so that I could look up into her face. For a moment her eyes opened wide into mine, then fell in embarrassment, like those of a child who has asked what may prove a foolish question. "What do you mean, Ann?” I said. Her words faltered a little. "I-I don't know exactly how to express it,” she began. "I've never had anything like it to express before. It-it's the feeling that you are never any more alone I don't mean people-but-at night it's as if there was no roof to your room at all, as if it was all open to the stars. Do you suppose it is what our mothers and fathers used to called religion?” "It's "I suppose so," I answered. what they meant, even if they didn't feel it. Have you ever read 'The Hound of Heaven'? " She shook her head. "What a queer name!" she said. She gathered together her words as if afraid they might stumble too lamely. "You see," she explained, "it never used to be this way. I was al |