orchard to
smoke.

When I came back, I found Miss Somers as she had been the day before,
crouched listlessly in her long chair fondling her idol. I drew up a
horsehair rocking-chair and plunged in.

"Why do you play with that silly thing?"

"This?" She stroked the idol. "It is rather lovely, Father got it in
Benares. The carving is very cunningly done. Look at the nose and mouth.
The rank Hinduism of the thing amuses me. Perhaps it was cruel to bring
it up here where there are no other gods for it to play with. But it's
all I've got. They had to sell everything, you know. When I get
stronger, I'll send it back to New York and sell it too."

"Why did you keep it out of all the things you had?"

"I don't know. I think it was the first thing we ever bought in India.
And I remember Benares with so much pleasure. Wasn't it a pity we
couldn't have been there when everything happened?"

"Much better not, I should think. You needed surgeons."

"Just what I didn't need! I should have liked to die in a country that
had something to say for itself. I don't feel as though this place had
ever existed, except in some hideous dream."

"It's not hideous. It's even very beautiful--so wild and untouched; such
lovely contours to the mountains."

"Yes, it's very untouched." She spoke of it with just the same scorn I
had in old days heard her use for certain novelists. "Scarcely worth the
trouble of touching I should think--shouldn't you?"

"The beauty of it last night and this morning has knocked me over," I
replied hardily.

"Oh, really! How very interesting!" By which she meant that she was not
interested at all.

"You mean that you would like it landscape-gardened?" Really, she was
perverse. She had turned her back to the view--which was ripping, out of
her northern window. I could tell that she habitually turned her back on
it.

"Oh, landscape-gardened? Well, it would improve it, no doubt. But it
would take generations to do it. The generations that have been here
already don't seem to have accomplished much. Humanly speaking, they
have hardly existed at all."

Kathleen Somers was no snob in the ordinary sense. She was an angel to
peasants. I knew perfectly what she meant by "humanly." She meant there
was no castle on the next hill.

"Are you incapable of caring for nature--just scenery?"

"Quite." She closed her eyes, and stopped her gentle, even stroking of
the idol.

"Of course you never did see America first,