that America is for Americans only, and
that it is the patriotic duty of those who come here to be Americanized
as rapidly as possible, and the duty of the regular Americans to
Americanize everybody else at top speed--but it can not be done. They are
they, and we are we. It may be our duty, but we are not big enough."

She did not call her friendship with Angelo Moreno by any such big and
formal term as assimilation. They had just grown to be enormously good
friends. She had forgotten about Americanizing him, but she found him
charming, with the fresh frank abandon of the unspoiled south-European.
She liked his open admiration, she enjoyed his mature cynicism, she
reveled in his buoyant enthusiasm. She had not believed that such
opposing elements could dwell in one small person. In Angelo, she found
them, and she found the combination good.

He was helpful to Eveley, as well as pleasing. He did endless small jobs
for her about the car and upon the lawn of her home. And when she noticed
that he quickly adopted some of her own little customs of speech and
manner, she was freshly pleased and interested.

Still she could not harden her heart to the clamorous call of the world
struggle. She lived so happily and so securely in her Cloud Cote, going
to business by day, doing her small bits of housework in between whiles,
frolicking with her friends, chumming with Angelo, playing with her
sister's babies, running about in her pretty car. It was like living in
the clouds indeed, with the world of chaos beneath. For there was the
struggle of reconstruction going on, the tremendous heave and pull of
masses seeking to dominate, the subtle writhe and twist of politics, a
whole world straining and sinewing to rise dominant out of the molten bed
of human lava left from the volcanic eruption of war.

And although Eveley still lived serene in her Cloud Cote, it was like
living on the edge of the crater of a volcano. The eruption would come,
must come. And when it came, her pretty Cloud Cote might be caught in the
upheaval. Sometimes in the evening she stood breathless in the little
pavilion on the edge of the canyon stretching down below her home, and
looked far into the shadows. Being a vivid imaginer, down in the darkness
she seemed to see the world in turmoil, and although she stood above it
on the heights, she knew that when the final reckoning came, there would
be no heights and no canyon.

"And the only thing that can stop it