remained with her, coloring painfully all the vistas of dim woodland
aisles and sunlit brooks, was of the meagerness and meanness of the
desolate lives lived in this paradise. This was a fact she had not noticed
as a child, accepting the country people as she did all other
incomprehensible elders. They had not seemed to her to differ noticeably
from her delicate, esthetic mother, lying in lavender silk negligées on
wicker couches, reading the latest book of Mallarmé, or from her
competent, rustling aunt, guiding the course of the summer colony's social
life with firm hands. There was as yet no summer colony, this week in May.
Even the big hotel was not open. Virginia was lodged in the house of one
of the farmers. There was no element to distract her mind from the narrow,
unlovely lives of the owners of that valley of beauty.

They were grinding away at their stupefying monotonous tasks as though the
miracle of spring were not taking place before their eyes. They were
absorbed in their barnyards and kitchen sinks and bad cooking and worse
dressmaking. The very children, grimy little utilitarians like their
parents, only went abroad in the flood of golden sunshine, in order to
rifle the hill pastures of their wild strawberries. Virginia was no longer
a child to ignore all this. It was an embittering, imprisoning thought
from which she could not escape even in the most radiant vision of May
woods. She was a woman now, with a trained mind which took in the
saddening significance of these lives, not so much melancholy or tragic as
utterly neutral, featureless, dun-colored. They weighed on her heart as
she walked and drove about the lovely country they spoiled for her.

What a heavenly country it was! She compared it to similar valleys in
Switzerland, in Norway, in Japan, and her own shone out pre-eminent with a
thousand beauties of bold skyline, of harmoniously "composed" distances,
of exquisitely fairy-like detail of foreground. But oh! the wooden