Darn it all! Don't
make a sleep-walking Lady Macbeth tragedy out of it! Chuck the bally
thing and come on down to the Valley! Why do you waste your life
pretending you are Providence steering the whole earth? Chuck it,
Dickie! If you were in town, I'd give you a cocktail! Got anything up
here?"

Wayland went to sleep to dream one of those dreams that envelop day
with rain-bow mist. He dreamed that the amethyst gates of the sun had
swung ajar flooding life with countless charioteers each carrying a
golden spear, and as they advanced over the clouds to earth, all the
little purple heather bells that had hung their heads during the night
to keep out the dew, all the waxy chalices of the winter-greens pale
and faint with passion, all the bells nodding to the wind, began
ringing--ringing ten thousand golden bells; and the painter's brush,
multicolored dazzling knee-deep in the Alpine meadows, flaunted
countless torches of carmine flame to welcome back the day. Then,
suddenly, it wasn't a sound of bells at all. It was her voice, her
voice with the golden note and the liquid break that came when he had
surprised Love in her eyes; and it wasn't the warmth of the Sun's
fan-shaped shafts at all; it was the warmth of her lips in the face of
the picture she had promised--the face above "the Warrior." When he
awakened, a sprig of everlasting that he had stuck in the band of his
Alpine hat had blown across his face.

CHAPTER VI

WHEREIN ONE PLAYS AN UNCONSCIOUS PART

Watch a snow flake as it falls! Gentle is too rough a word for the
motion. It floats, a crystal cob-web shot with the glint of
sun-jewels; tangible but melting to your touch, evanescent and
translucent as light; conceived of the wind that bloweth where it
listeth and the gossamer clouds of a vague somewhere.

Waveringly, noiselessly, so noiselessly it comes that you do not catch
the rustling flutter with your ear, but with a sixth sense of motion.
And it transforms, bewitches, beautifies what it touches. I suppose if
such an evanescent thing were told that it and it alone had been the
age-old, time-immemorial sculptor of the granite rocks; that it and it
alone--to paraphrase the words of the scientists--had rolled away the
door from the sepulchers of the eternal rocks and turned a planet into
a sensate earth pulsing with growth--I suppose if a snow flake were
told such heresy, it would die of its own amaze.

This, _apropos_ of nothing in partic