she did
not feel herself as yet an integral part of the busy, absorbing life to
which she had returned. The countless tendrils of Endbury feelings,
standards, activities, brushed against her, but had not as yet laid hold
on her. Europe had never been more real to her young-lady eyes than an
immense World's Exposition, rather overwhelmingly full of objects to be
inspected, and now, here in Ohio, even that impression was dim and
remote. But so, also, was Endbury; she had left the one, she had not yet
arrived at the other. She felt herself for the moment in a neutral
territory that was scarcely terrestrial.

The silent house was a kingdom of delight to be rediscovered. She
wandered about it, enchanted with the impressions which her solitude
gave her leisure to savor and digest. She threw open a window, and was
struck with the sweet freshness of the morning air, as though it were a
joy new in the history of the world. She looked out on the lawn, with
its dew-studded cobwebs, and felt her heart contract with pleasure. When
she stepped out on the veranda, the look of the trees, the breath of the
light wind across her cheek, the odor of dawn, all the indefinable
personality of that early hour was like an enchantment about her.

She ran out to her favorite arbor and plucked one of the heavy clusters
of purple grapes, finding their cool acidity an exquisite surprise. She
raised her face to the sky with wonder. She had never, it seemed to her,
seen so pure yet colorful a sky. The horizon was still faintly flushed
with the promise of a dawn already fulfilled in the fresh splendor of
the sunbeams slanting across the fresh splendor of her own youth.

Never again did Lydia see the things she saw that morning. Never again
did she have so unquestioningly the happy child's conception of the
whole world as magically centered in indulgent kindness about herself.
As she looked up the clean, empty street stretching away under the shade
of its thrifty young trees, it seemed made only to lead her forward into
the life for which she had been so long preparing herself. Endbury, with
its shops, its bustle of factories so unmeaning to her, the great bulk
of its inexplicable "business," existed only as the theater upon the
stage of which she was to play the leading role in the drama of
life--she almost consciously thought of it in those terms--which, after
some exciting and pleasurable incidents and a few thrilling situations,
was to have a hap