ark skeleton of the barn. The white birches, strange
sylvan denizens of door and barnyard, stood shaking their delicate leaves
as if announcing sweetly that the kind forest would cover all the wounds
of human neglect, and soon everything would be as though man had not
lived. And everywhere grew the thick, strong, glistening grass, covering
even the threshold with a cushion on which the child's foot fell as
noiselessly as a shadow. It used to seem to her that nothing could ever
have happened in this breathless spot.

Now she was a grown woman, she told herself, twenty-three years old and
had had, she often thought, as full a life as any one of her age could
have. Her college course had been varied with vacations in Europe; she had
had one season in society; she was just back from a trip around the world.
Her busy, absorbing life had given her no time to revisit the narrow green
Valley where she had spent so many of her childhood's holidays But now a
whim for self-analysis, a desire to learn if the old glamour about the
lovely enchanted region still existed for her weary, sophisticated
maturity, had made her break exacting social engagements and sent her back
alone, from the city, to see how the old valley looked in the spring.

Her disappointment was acute. The first impression and the one which
remained with her, coloring painfully all the vistas of dim woodland
aisles and sunlit brooks, was of the meagerness and meanness of the
desolate lives lived in this paradise. This was a fact she had not noticed
as a child, accepting the country people as she did all other
incomprehensible elders. They had not seemed to her to differ noticeably
from her delicate, esthetic mother, lying in lavender silk negligees on
wicker couches, reading the latest book of Mallarme, or from her
competent, rustling aunt, guiding the course of the summer colony's social
life with firm hands. There was as yet no summer colony, this week in May.
Even the big hotel was not open. Virginia was lodged in the house of one
of the farmers. There was no element to distract her mind from the narrow,
unlovely lives of the owners of that valley of beauty.

They were grinding away at their stupefying monotonous tasks as though the
miracle of spring were not taking place before their eyes. They were
absorbed in their barnyards and kitchen sinks and bad cooking and worse
dressmaking. The very children, grimy little utilitarians like their
parents, only went abro