sly she stepped through one of the windows, crossed the
verandah and drive, and entered the long narrow path between the lawns.
Here there was more sense of space, for the lawns were very large; but
the trees were close along their edge and massed heavily at the end of
the perspective. Above was a long banner of night sky. The monotonous
chanting of frogs was the only sound.

Certainly, California is a land of beauty and peace, she thought. Mr.
Trennahan says he has never known anything like it, and he has been
everywhere. Everybody should be happy in it, and I suppose everyone is,
mostly. Poets like Tennyson always make weather to suit moods and
circumstances. If they are right, one should laugh and be happy for
eight months in the year in California, and only sad when it rains.
There does not seem much chance for tragedy, although I have heard that
there are many murders and suicides; but perhaps that is because the
towns are new and excitable. There is nothing in the country itself to
make one unhappy, as there must be in other countries where Nature has
done so little, and they have so many centuries of tragic past behind
them.... Oh, dear, I am struggling toward something, as usual. What is
it?

She touched her fingers to her forehead, then drew them lightly back and
forth, as if to clear the mist from her brain, the rust from the
wheels.... I seem to have seeds in my mind. Why don't they sprout? Why
are they for ever knocking at the hard earth over their heads? One would
think they were in their graves instead of never having been born.

She sighed and shook her head, but her thoughts ran on. Am I happy? I
think so. And all the girls seem happy. Mr. Trennahan says he watched
the rest of the world rise into an inverted abyss of smoke when the
train slid down the Sierras, and that his memory has been asleep ever
since. I have been unhappy here! she continued abruptly. And one night I
suffered--suffered horribly--and this last week----She stopped short,
looking at the beauty and peace about her with a feeling of sharp and
swift resentment. She had a sense of being betrayed by the country of
which she was, far more than her mates, a part. She was of its first
blood, the daughter of its Arcadia, the last living representative of
all that it had been in the fulness of its power. And she knew
California and felt it as no one else did. That sense of betrayal, of
personal treachery, passed as swiftly as it had come, but