entered it. He threw himself on the
bed, and slept away the fatigue of his railroad journey and the cold of
his drive with Jombateeste from the station. His nap was long, and he
woke from it in a pleasant languor, with the dream-clouds still hanging
in his brain. He opened the damper of his stove, and set it roaring
again; then he pulled down the upper sash of his window and looked
out on a world whose elements of wood and snow and stone he tried to
co-ordinate. There was nothing else in that world but these things, so
repellent of one another. He suffered from the incongruity of the wooden
bulk of the hotel, with the white drifts deep about it, and with the
granite cliffs of Lion's Head before it, where the gray crags darkened
under the pink afternoon light which was beginning to play upon its
crest from the early sunset. The wind that had seemed to bore through
his thick cap and his skull itself, and that had tossed the dry snow
like dust against his eyes on his way from the railroad, had now fallen,
and an incomparable quiet wrapped the solitude of the hills. A
teasing sense of the impossibility of the scene, as far as his art was
concerned, filled him full of a fond despair of rendering its feeling.
He could give its light and color and form in a sufficiently vivid
suggestion of the fact, but he could not make that pink flush seem
to exhale, like a long breath, upon those rugged shapes; he could not
impart that sentiment of delicately, almost of elegance, which he
found in the wilderness, while every detail of civilization physically
distressed him. In one place the snow had been dug down to the pine
planking of the pathway round the house; and the contact of this
woodenness with the frozen ground pierced his nerves and set his teeth
on edge like a harsh noise. When once he saw it he had to make an effort
to take his eyes from it, and in a sort unknown to him in summer he
perceived the offence of the hotel itself amid the pure and lonely
beauty of the winter landscape. It was a note of intolerable banality,
of philistine pretence and vulgar convention, such as Whitwell's low,
unpainted cottage at the foot of the hill did not give, nor the little
red school-house, on the other hand, showing through the naked trees.
There should have been really no human habitation visible except a
wigwam in the shelter of the pines, here and there; and when he saw
Whitwell making his way up the hill-side road, Westover felt that if
th