e, pleasant in strange ways, and foreign to all
familiar things? She wouldn't even fall in love with Arnold Withrow, who
was her only chance. For I saw that Arnold, if he ever came, would,
fatally, love the place. She might have put up with the stock-broking,
but she never could have borne his liking the view. Yes, I was very
unhappy as I drove into Hebron; and when I finally achieved the Pullman
at the Junction, I was unhappier still. For I felt towards that Pullman
as the lost child feels toward its nurse; and I knew that Kathleen
Somers, ill, poor, middle-aged, and a woman, was a thousand times more
the child of the Pullman than I.

I have told this in detail, because I hate giving things at second-hand.
Yet there my connection with Kathleen Somers ceased, and her tragedy
deepened before other witnesses. She stayed on in her hills; too proud
to visit her friends, too sane to spend her money on a flying trip to
town, too bruised and faint to fight her fate. The only thing she tried
for was apathy. I think she hoped--when she hoped anything--that her
mind would go, a little: not so much that she would have to be "put
away"; but just enough so that she could see things in a mist--so that
the hated hills might, for all she knew, be Alps, the rocks turn into
castles, the stony fields into vineyards, and Joel Blake into a Tuscan.
Just enough so that she could re-create her world from her blessed
memories, without any sharp corrective senses to interfere. That, I am
sure, was what she fixed her mind upon through the prolonged autumn;
bending all her frail strength to turn her brain ever so little from its
rigid attitude to fact. "Pretending" was no good: it maddened. If her
mind would only pretend without her help! That would be heaven, until
heaven really came.... You can't sympathize with her, probably, you
people who have been bred up on every kind of Nature cult. I can hear
you talking about the everlasting hills. Don't you see, that was the
trouble? Her carefully trained imagination was her religion, and in her
own way she was a ritualist. The mountains she faced were unbaptized:
the Holy Ghost had never descended upon them. She was as narrow as a
nun; but she could not help it. And remember, you practical people who
love woodchucks, that she had nothing but the view to make life
tolerable. The view was no mere accessory to a normal existence. She
lived, half-ill, in an ugly, not too comfortable cottage, as far as the