e absence of natural boundaries gave the spirit a
wider range. Wire fences might mark the end of a man's pasture, but they
could not shut in his thoughts as mountains and forests can. It was over
flat lands like this, stretching out to drink the sun, that the larks
sang--and one's heart sang there, too. Thea was glad that this was her
country, even if one did not learn to speak elegantly there. It was,
somehow, an honest country, and there was a new song in that blue air
which had never been sung in the world before. It was hard to tell about
it, for it had nothing to do with words; it was like the light of the
desert at noon, or the smell of the sagebrush after rain; intangible but
powerful. She had the sense of going back to a friendly soil, whose
friendship was somehow going to strengthen her; a naive, generous
country that gave one its joyous force, its large-hearted, childlike
power to love, just as it gave one its coarse, brilliant flowers.

As she drew in that glorious air Thea's mind went back to Ray Kennedy.
He, too, had that feeling of empire; as if all the Southwest really
belonged to him because he had knocked about over it so much, and knew
it, as he said, "like the blisters on his own hands." That feeling, she
reflected, was the real element of companionship between her and Ray.
Now that she was going back to Colorado, she realized this as she had
not done before.

IX

THEA reached Moonstone in the late afternoon, and all the Kronborgs were
there to meet her except her two older brothers. Gus and Charley were
young men now, and they had declared at noon that it would "look silly
if the whole bunch went down to the train." "There's no use making a
fuss over Thea just because she's been to Chicago," Charley warned his
mother. "She's inclined to think pretty well of herself, anyhow, and if
you go treating her like company, there'll be no living in the house
with her." Mrs. Kronborg simply leveled her eyes at Charley, and he
faded away, muttering. She had, as Mr. Kronborg always said with an
inclination of his head, good control over her children. Anna, too,
wished to absent herself from the party, but in the end her curiosity
got the better of her. So when Thea stepped down from the porter's
stool, a very creditable Kronborg representation was grouped on the
platform to greet her. After they had all kissed her (Gunner and Axel
shyly), Mr. Kronborg hurried his flock into the hotel omnibus, in which
th