skiing. They shouted and threw
snowballs, and informed her that it was SUCH fun, and they'd have
another skiing expedition right away, and they jollily returned home and
never thereafter left their manuals of bridge.

Carol was discouraged. She was grateful when Kennicott invited her to
go rabbit-hunting in the woods. She waded down stilly cloisters
between burnt stump and icy oak, through drifts marked with a million
hieroglyphics of rabbit and mouse and bird. She squealed as he leaped
on a pile of brush and fired at the rabbit which ran out. He belonged
there, masculine in reefer and sweater and high-laced boots. That night
she ate prodigiously of steak and fried potatoes; she produced electric
sparks by touching his ear with her finger-tip; she slept twelve hours;
and awoke to think how glorious was this brave land.

She rose to a radiance of sun on snow. Snug in her furs she
trotted up-town. Frosted shingles smoked against a sky colored like
flax-blossoms, sleigh-bells clinked, shouts of greeting were loud in the
thin bright air, and everywhere was a rhythmic sound of wood-sawing. It
was Saturday, and the neighbors' sons were getting up the winter fuel.
Behind walls of corded wood in back yards their sawbucks stood in
depressions scattered with canary-yellow flakes of sawdust. The frames
of their buck-saws were cherry-red, the blades blued steel, and the
fresh cut ends of the sticks--poplar, maple, iron-wood, birch--were
marked with engraved rings of growth. The boys wore shoe-packs, blue
flannel shirts with enormous pearl buttons, and mackinaws of crimson,
lemon yellow, and foxy brown.

Carol cried "Fine day!" to the boys; she came in a glow to Howland &
Gould's grocery, her collar white with frost from her breath; she bought
a can of tomatoes as though it were Orient fruit; and returned home
planning to surprise Kennicott with an omelet creole for dinner.

So brilliant was the snow-glare that when she entered the house she
saw the door-knobs, the newspaper on the table, every white surface as
dazzling mauve, and her head was dizzy in the pyrotechnic dimness. When
her eyes had recovered she felt expanded, drunk with health, mistress of
life. The world was so luminous that she sat down at her rickety little
desk in the living-room to make a poem. (She got no farther than "The
sky is bright, the sun is warm, there ne'er will be another storm.")

In the mid-afternoon of this same day Kennicott was called into the