yes--the eyes of a young doe--a look of uneasiness,
of distrust, and aversion. Los Muertos frightened her. She remembered
the days of her young girlhood passed on a farm in eastern Ohio--five
hundred acres, neatly partitioned into the water lot, the cow pasture,
the corn lot, the barley field, and wheat farm; cosey, comfortable,
home-like; where the farmers loved their land, caressing it, coaxing it,
nourishing it as though it were a thing almost conscious; where the seed
was sown by hand, and a single two-horse plough was sufficient for the
entire farm; where the scythe sufficed to cut the harvest and the grain
was thrashed with flails.

But this new order of things--a ranch bounded only by the horizons,
where, as far as one could see, to the north, to the east, to the south
and to the west, was all one holding, a principality ruled with iron and
steam, bullied into a yield of three hundred and fifty thousand bushels,
where even when the land was resting, unploughed, unharrowed, and
unsown, the wheat came up--troubled her, and even at times filled her
with an undefinable terror. To her mind there was something inordinate
about it all; something almost unnatural. The direct brutality of ten
thousand acres of wheat, nothing but wheat as far as the eye could see,
stunned her a little. The one-time writing-teacher of a young ladies'
seminary, with her pretty deer-like eyes and delicate fingers, shrank
from it. She did not want to look at so much wheat. There was something
vaguely indecent in the sight, this food of the people, this elemental
force, this basic energy, weltering here under the sun in all the
unconscious nakedness of a sprawling, primordial Titan.

The monotony of the ranch ate into her heart hour by hour, year by year.
And with it all, when was she to see Rome, Italy, and the Bay of Naples?
It was a different prospect truly. Magnus had given her his promise
that once the ranch was well established, they two should travel. But
continually he had been obliged to put her off, now for one reason, now
for another; the machine would not as yet run of itself, he must still
feel his hand upon the lever; next year, perhaps, when wheat should go
to ninety, or the rains were good. She did not insist. She obliterated
herself, only allowing, from time to time, her pretty, questioning eyes
to meet his. In the meantime she retired within herself. She surrounded
herself with books. Her taste was of the delicacy of point lac