ight, when the clear, cold air seemed to
tremble with lusty health, Myra sat alone in the Ramble, before the
little frozen pond. And she thought:

"This is the bench we sat on; and it was here, that morning, that we
quarreled; and this is the little pond; and those the trees--but how
changed! how changed!"

A world-city practises magic. Any one who for years has slept in her
walls and worn the pave of her streets and mingled with her crowds and
her lighted nights, is changed by her subtle enchantment into a child of
the city. He is never free thereafter. The metropolis may send him forth
like a carrier-pigeon, and he may think he is well rid of his mistress,
but the homing instinct inevitably draws him back. "All other
pleasures," as Emerson said of love, "are not worth its pains." Myra
thought that she hated New York--the great nervous sea of life, whose
noise and stress and tragedy had shattered her health. She had longed
for the peace of nature; she had gone forth to the meadows and the
mountains, and for a long time been content with the sounds of the
barnyard and the farm, the wind and the brook; she had sunk, as it were,
into the arms of the earth and rested on that great nourishing breast.
She loved pure air, far horizons, quiet, and the mysterious changes of
the landscape. She thought she was done with the city forever. For had
she not found that the Vision of White Towers seen that first evening
was hollow and bitter at the heart, that beneath the beauty was dust and
horror, routine and disease?

But one snow-bound morning as she gazed out from the quiet house and saw
the limitless white of the world, the fences buried, the trees loaded,
the earth lost under the gray heavens, suddenly she was filled with a
passionate desire for _life_. She was amazed at the restlessness in her
heart. But she could not shake it off. Her desire was very definite--to
walk down Eightieth Street, to hear and see the trolleys bounding down
the little hill to Seventy-ninth Street, to shop on Third Avenue, to go
threading her way through the swarm of school children outside the
school gates. And then subtly she felt the elixir of a Broadway night,
the golden witchery of the lights, the laughter-smitten people, the
crowded cars and motors, the shining shops, the warmth of the crowd. A
thousand memories of streets and rooms, of people and of things, flooded
her mind. The country seemed barren and cold and lonely. She was
grievously ho