severe pain; but the education, now past its grades, had become a
labor of love. She had perfect health, abounding spirits. She
was so active hat she had to train herself into taking the midday
siesta, a custom of the country and imperative during the hot
summer months. Sometimes she looked in her mirror and laughed
with sheer joy at sight of the lithe, audacious, brown-faced,
flashing-eyed creature reflected there. It was not so much joy
in her beauty as sheer joy of life. Eastern critics had been
wont to call her beautiful in those days when she had been pale
and slender and proud and cold. She laughed. If they could only
see her now! From the tip of her golden head to her feet she was
alive, pulsating, on fire.

Sometimes she thought of her parents, sister, friends, of how
they had persistently refused to believe she could or would stay
in the West. They were always asking her to come home. And when
she wrote, which was dutifully often, the last thing under the
sun that she was likely to mention was the change in her. She
wrote that she would return to her old home some time, of course,
for a visit; and letters such as this brought returns that amused
Madeline, sometimes saddened her. She meant to go back East for a
while, and after that once or twice every year. But the
initiative was a difficult step from which she shrank. Once
home, she would have to make explanations, and these would not be
understood. Her father's business had been such that he could
not leave it for the time required for a Western trip, or else,
according to his letter, he would have come for her. Mrs.
Hammond could not have been driven to cross the Hudson River; her
un-American idea of the wilderness westward was that Indians
still chased buffalo on the outskirts of Chicago. Madeline's