air's-breadth too far did she permit her inflammable
lover to venture. Belinda as Goddess would have compelled all Olympus to
address her as Mrs. Vulcan.

* * * * *

And so, towards the end of December, Sophy left Bobby in the care of
Charlotte and Harold Grey, and went to desolate, far-western Ontowega.
After six months of that desolation she would be free again. It seemed
incredible. She did not go alone, however. Susan Pickett, a second
cousin of whom she and Charlotte had been very fond since childhood,
went with her. Miss Pickett was a delightful spinster of fifty. She had
not married, simply because she had never loved a man enough to want to
marry him.

No one ever called Susan Pickett "Cousin Susan" or "Aunt Susan." She was
"Sue" to all who loved her, young as well as old. She was a tall,
vigorous woman, deep-breasted, and of perfect health. Her thick, brown
eyebrows were masculine, her large, well-shaped mouth feminine. Her
eyes, deep-set, grey, and humorous, might have been either a man's or a
woman's. Eyes of this type--when they are kindly affectionate, as in Sue
Pickett's case, are the sign of a big, impersonal humanity. It was never
necessary to have Sue "on one's mind" even for a moment. She was always
occupied in some way, and always serenely content. This is why Sophy
ventured to ask her to share with her for six months the abomination of
desolation called on the map of the United States Ontowega.

During the first stages of the long, tiresome journey Sophy was
conscious only of a heavy, dull weight of determination and flat
sadness. She hated the smell of train-smoke. Now it seemed as if this
rank, clogging smoke trailed over the whole landscape of her life, past
and future. She sat drearily, hour after hour, watching the telegraph
poles snatch up the sagging wires as they flew past. The threads of her
own life were like that, she thought--dark strands strung from one bare
pole of fact to another, endlessly, monotonously. The bare poles had
once been trees--living, joyous things. So had the bare facts of her
life. Now lopped, stripped, rigid, they hemmed her in, guiding the
thread of her destiny to some dull, conventional end--some mechanical
fixture in a bleak station to which this hard, beaten road of divorce
was leading.

* * * * *

After certain matters at Ontowega had been settled, they found that they
could go to the Black Hills