down several hundred feet to the stream, and this hot rock was
sparsely grown with dwarf trees. Their colors were so pale that the
shadows of the little trees on the rock stood out sharper than the trees
themselves. When Thea first came, the chokecherry bushes were in
blossom, and the scent of them was almost sickeningly sweet after a
shower. At the very bottom of the canyon, along the stream, there was a
thread of bright, flickering, golden-green,--cottonwood seedlings. They
made a living, chattering screen behind which she took her bath every
morning.

Thea went down to the stream by the Indian water trail. She had found a
bathing-pool with a sand bottom, where the creek was damned by fallen
trees. The climb back was long and steep, and when she reached her
little house in the cliff she always felt fresh delight in its comfort
and inaccessibility. By the time she got there, the woolly red-and-gray
blankets were saturated with sunlight, and she sometimes fell asleep as
soon as she stretched her body on their warm surfaces. She used to
wonder at her own inactivity. She could lie there hour after hour in the
sun and listen to the strident whir of the big locusts, and to the
light, ironical laughter of the quaking asps. All her life she had been
hurrying and sputtering, as if she had been born behind time and had
been trying to catch up. Now, she reflected, as she drew herself out
long upon the rugs, it was as if she were waiting for something to catch
up with her. She had got to a place where she was out of the stream of
meaningless activity and undirected effort.

Here she could lie for half a day undistracted, holding pleasant and
incomplete conceptions in her mind--almost in her hands. They were
scarcely clear enough to be called ideas. They had something to do with
fragrance and color and sound, but almost nothing to do with words. She
was singing very little now, but a song would go through her head all
morning, as a spring keeps welling up, and it was like a pleasant
sensation indefinitely prolonged. It was much more like a sensation than
like an idea, or an act of remembering. Music had never come to her in
that sensuous form before. It had always been a thing to be struggled
with, had always brought anxiety and exaltation and chagrin--never
content and indolence. Thea began to wonder whether people could not
utterly lose the power to work, as they can lose their voice or their
memory. She had always been a litt