he most intense medium for the revealment of emotion?

"What am I good for? Ah, what shall I do with my life?"

Late in the afternoon a boatman rowed her out on the lake. At twilight
the mauve shadows on the cliffs combined with the pallor of the Alps to
form round her a setting full of poetry and pathos. She thought how
perfectly these things might once have enclosed her in the scenery of
love--yet now, for some reason, they were incapable of composing with a
proper vividness the scenery of grief.

She returned to the villa to find visitors, women whom she had known in
girlhood, who had married members of the Italian nobility, and now were
sojourning in the neighborhood. They brought men with them, and
sometimes stayed to dinner.

One night, as she leaned against the balustrade of the terrace,
watching the strings of lights across the lake, a young Roman, tall,
dark and aquiline, handsome and strong, laid his hand upon hers.

"It is a world made for happiness," he breathed.

The others, in the white-walled room now mellow from lamplight, were
clustered round the piano, and one of them was singing a song by Tosti.
Without drawing away her hand, Lilla returned:

"Happiness. Yes, tell me what it consists in."

"In the glory of life and love. In the splendors of this world and our
acceptance of them--we who are this world's strange, sensitive
culmination. Not to question, but to feel, with these feelings of ours
that a thousand generations have made so fine, so complex. To be
natural in the heart of nature."

She smiled mournfully:

"You realists! And are these things that you celebrate reality? They
fade and die----"

"But while they live they live," he cried low, with an accent of
austere passion, and seized her in his arms.

For a moment she did not move. She let herself feel that contact, that
strength and fervor, with a nearly analytical attentiveness, with, a
melancholy curiosity. But of a sudden she pushed him from her with a
surprising strength, her heart beating wildly. She stared at him in
amazement, then entered the house.

A fortnight later she returned to New York.

Winter was imminent; but few of her friends had yet appeared in town.
One day on Fifth Avenue, however, she met old Brantome, the critic, who
invited her to an afternoon of music at his apartment.

CHAPTER XVII

In Brantome's living room the book shelves rose to the ceiling; between
them the spaces on the wall