htfall.
I mean, the glare of your incandescent lights. I honestly believe that
that glare, more than any other single thing, holds throngs of people to
an existence not only unnatural, but laden with a something that crushes
as well." She was silent.

Again Stephen felt the strange pull on his interest, but he said
nothing. After a time she went on.

"City-dwellers," she explained, "don't begin their day till the approach
of dark. It's true of both levels of society, too--lower as well as
upper. And I believe the reason for this lies, as I have said, in the
atmosphere--their man-made atmosphere--just as the secret of your
feeling the way you do lies in our atmosphere--God-made. Were this
atmosphere suddenly to disappear, both out of your cities and out of my
deserts, both your world and my own would lose all of their charm."

Stephen bestirred himself. "What psychology do you find in that?" he
asked, dwelling upon the fact that she knew his East so well.

"Merely the effect of softening things--for the soul as well as the
eye--through the eye, indeed, to the soul. Our atmosphere here does
that--softens the houses, and the trees, and the cattle, and the
mountains, and the distant reaches. It softens our nights, too. Perhaps
you have noticed it? How everything appears shrouded in a kind of hazy,
mellow, translucent something that somehow reacts upon you? I have. And
I believe that is the secret of one's wanting to remain in the country,
once he has exposed himself to it. It is a kind of spell--a hypnosis.
When out of it one wants to get back into it.

"I know I felt it when I was East, attending school," she went on,
quietly. "Living always in this atmosphere, I somehow had forgotten its
charm--as one will forget all subtle beauty unless frequently and
forcibly reminded of it. But in the East I missed it, and found myself
restless and anxious to get back into it. Indeed, I felt that I must get
back or die! So one day, when your Eastern spirit of sudden change was
upon me, I packed and came home. It was a year short of my degree, too.
But I could not remain away another day--simply had to get back--and
back I came. My degree--my sheepskin"--she was smiling--"couldn't hold
me!"

"Then you've spent some time in the East?" he asked, tentatively.

"Yes," she replied, "that much--three years. And I didn't like it."

"Why?" he asked, a little surprised.

She regarded him curiously. He saw a look of mild annoyance in he