of her.

Her opponent, this potent, significant personality, lounging on the
bench beside her, resting in the interval of a life the intensity of
which was out of her world altogether, the life, all power, of a modern
rich man in great affairs; controlling vast forces, swaying and shaping
the lives of thousands of weaker men as no potentate had ever done,
living in the instants he allowed himself for personal life (she felt
again the pang of her sympathy for his look of fierce, inexplicable
pain) with a concentration in harmony with the great scale of his other
activities. It was, just as the cheap novels called it, a sort, a bad,
inhuman, colorful, fascinating sort of modern version of the superman's
life, she reflected. She had been ridiculous to project her village
insignificance into that large-scale landscape.

A distant whistle blew a long, full note, filling the valley with its
vibrations.

"Is that a train, at this hour?" murmured Mr. Welles. His voice was sunk
to a somnolent monotone, his hands folded over his waistcoat moved
slowly and rhythmically with his breathing. It was evident that he did
not in the least care whether it was a train or not.

"Oh _no!_" said Marise, severely, disapproving the vagueness and
inaccuracy of his observation. "That's the mill-whistle, blowing the
closing-hour. You're no true Ashleyan, not to have learned the
difference between the voices of the different whistles of the day."

She turned to Marsh, tilting her wings for a capricious flight. "I think
it's part of the stubborn stiff-jointedness of human imagination, don't
you, that we don't hear the beauty of those great steam-whistles. I
wonder if it's not unconscious art that gave to our mighty machines such
voices of qower."

"Isn't it perhaps ostentatious to call the family saw-mill a 'mighty
machine'?" inquired Marsh mildly. He sat at the end of the bench, his
arm along the back behind Mr. Welles, his head turned to the side, his
soft hat pulled low over his forehead, looking at the garden and at
Marise out of half-shut, sleepy eyes.

Marise went on, drawing breath for a longer flight. "When the train
comes sweeping up the valley, trailing its great beautiful banner of
smoke, I feel as though it were the crescendo announcing something, and
at the crossing, when that noble rounded note blares out . . . why, it's
the music for the setting. Nothing else could cope with the depth of the
valley, the highness and blacknes