not great
enough to give it up. I tried to make the sacrifice, but I could not.
I tried to be as gay as you, and to live your sort of life; but I could
not do it. Do not make the effort to forgive me. You will be happier if
you simply hold me in the contempt I deserve."

I read the letter over and over. I do not know that I believe that the
spirit of inanimate things can permeate to the intelligence of man. I
am sure I always laughed at such ideas. Yet holding that note with its
shameful seeming words, I felt a consciousness that it was written in
purity and love. And then before my eyes there came a scene so
vivid that for a moment the office with its familiar furniture was
obliterated. What I saw was a long firm road, green with midsummer
luxuriance. The leisurely thudding of my horse's feet sounded in my
ears. Beside me was a tall, black-robed figure. I saw her look back with
that expression of deprivation at the sky line. "It's like living after
the world has begun to die," said the pensive minor voice. "It seems as
if part of the world had been taken down."

"Brainard," I yelled, "come here! I have it. Here's your explanation. I
can show you a new meaning for every line of this letter. Man, she has
gone to the mountains. She has gone to worship her own gods!"

Two weeks later I got a letter from Brainard, dated from Colorado.

"Old man," it said, "you're right. She is here. I found my mountain
woman here where the four voices of her cataracts had been calling to
her. I saw her the moment our mules rounded the road that commands the
valley. We had been riding all night and were drenched with cold dew,
hungry to desperation, and my spirits were of lead. Suddenly we got out
from behind the granite wall, and there she was, standing, where I had
seen her so often, beside the little waterfall that she calls the happy
one. She was looking straight up at the billowing mist that dipped down
the mountain, mammoth saffron rolls of it, plunging so madly from the
impetus of the wind that one marvelled how it could be noiseless. Ah,
you do not know Judith! That strange, unsophisticated, sometimes awkward
woman you saw bore no more resemblance to my mountain woman than I to
Hercules. How strong and beautiful she looked standing there wrapped in
an ecstasy! It was my primitive woman back in her primeval world. How
the blood leaped in me! All my old romance, so different from the common
love-histories of most men, was there aga