her,
determined to make a good impression to counteract whatever too great
insight her host might have shown in the matter of her first interest.
She bent her fine brows with the attention she had so often summoned
to face a difficult final examination, to read at the correct tempo a
complicated piece of music, to grasp the essentials of a new subject.
Her trained interest in understanding things, which of late had been
feeding on rather moldy scraps of cynical psychology, seized with
energy and delight on a change of diet. She not only tried to be
interested. Very shortly she was interested, absorbed, intent. What
Page had to say fascinated her. She even forgot who he was, and that
he was immensely rich. Though this forgetfulness was only momentary it
was an unspeakable relief and refreshment to her.

She listened intently; at times she asked a pertinent question; as she
walked she gave the man an occasional direct survey, as impersonal as
though he were a book from which she was reading. And exactly as an
intelligent reader, in a first perusal of a new subject, snatches the
heart out of paragraph after paragraph, ignoring the details until
later, she took to herself only the gist of her host's recital. Yes,
yes, she saw perfectly the generations of Vermont farmers who had
hated trees because they meant the wilderness, and whose destruction
of forests was only limited by the puniness of the forces they matched
against the great wooded slopes of the mountains they pre-empted. And
she saw later, the long years of utter neglect of those hacked-at and
half-destroyed forests while Page's grandfather and father descended
on the city and on financial operations with the fierce, fresh energy
of frontiersmen. She was struck by the fact that those ruthless
victors of Wall Street had not sold the hundreds of worthless acres,
which they never took the trouble to visit; and by the still more
significant fact that as the older ones of the family died, the
Austins, the Pages, the Woolsons, the Hawkers, and as legacy after
legacy of more worthless mountain acres came by inheritance to the
financiers, those tracts too were never sold. They never thought of
them, Page told her, except grumblingly to pay the taxes on them; they
considered them of ridiculously minute proportions compared to their
own titanic manipulations, but they had never sold them. Sylvia saw
them vividly, those self-made exiles from the mountains, and felt in
them