e
between us.

Yet there rose insistently before me the lissom beauty of his wife. The
light that tangled itself in her hair blinded and tortured me.

The deity I had built out of fancy and under the influence of the
tropics, laid itself in parallel with the woman I had seen last night.
The goddess I knew. The woman I loved and doubted. Was she only the
coquette who wanted to lead me chained at her chariot wheel for the
cheap joy of conquest? My goddess had not been that sort. What had she
to offer me in return for such a tribute to her vanity? Was I merely to
flit in the background of her life giving all that the heart has,
receiving nothing but the occasional condescension of a smile? Does
great beauty so preempt a woman's soul as to drive out even the homely
virtues?

These questions bored insistently into my brain until it ached with
perplexity. Then came the memory of her momentary wistfulness; her
craving for something more than life had given her, or something
different.

What was that? At all events, I knew that to fall again within the scope
of her personality would mean to be swept rudderless from my moorings.
Whatever her object, be it exalted or petty, I must inevitably bow to
it, in unconditional surrender, if such were her good or evil pleasure.
Consequently the one end of all my thinking was the resolve that I
should not again see her.

The journey was progressing with more surety than my reflections. It
whisked us through the richness of Bluegrass pasture lands, and the
opulent ease of Bluegrass life into a barer country where the color of
the soil grew mean and outcropping rocks lay bare. The landscape, as
though in keeping with my mood, dropped down a scale of bleakness.

The cleanliness of dignified mansions, spacious barns and whitewashed
fences gave place to less pretentious farm-houses in disrepair, and
these in turn dwindled to log cabins that were hardly better than
shanties, and choking undergrowth instead of clean meadows.

We roared through foothills where the vivid green of young cedars dashed
the gray tangle of naked timber and scrub. At last we climbed into the
mountains themselves, lying in dreary ramparts of isolation under skies
that had grown sodden and raw. Here were the barriers of the Cumberland
heaping up gigantic piles of raggedness under bristling needle points of
timber.

We passed through anomalous villages where the nation's most primitive
and quarantined life was ru