; the air,
which had just a tang of New England sharpness, was filled with tender
sounds, the clucking of hens, snatches of the songs of birds, the
rustling of maple leaves in the fitful breeze. A chipmunk ran down an
elm and stood staring at her with beady, inquisitive eyes, motionless
save for his quivering tail, and she put forth her hand, shyly,
beseechingly, as though he held the secret of life she craved. But he
darted away.

She looked around her unceasingly, at the sky, at the trees, at the
flowers and ferns and fields, at the vireos and thrushes, the robins and
tanagers gashing in and out amidst the foliage, and she was filled with
a strange yearning to expand and expand until she should become a part
of all nature, be absorbed into it, cease to be herself. Never before
had she known just that feeling, that degree of ecstasy mingled
with divine discontent.... Occasionally, intruding faintly upon the
countryside peace, she was aware of a distant humming sound that grew
louder and louder until there shot roaring past her an automobile filled
with noisy folk, leaving behind it a suffocating cloud of dust. Even
these intrusions, reminders of the city she had left, were powerless to
destroy her mood, and she began to skip, like a schoolgirl, pausing once
in a while to look around her fearfully, lest she was observed; and it
pleased her to think that she had escaped forever, that she would never
go back: she cried aloud, as she skipped, "I won't go back, I won't go
back," keeping time with her feet until she was out of breath and almost
intoxicated, delirious, casting herself down, her heart beating wildly,
on a bank of ferns, burying her face in them. She had really stopped
because a pebble had got into her shoe, and as she took it out she
looked at her bare heel and remarked ruefully:--"Those twenty-five cent
stockings aren't worth buying!"

Economic problems, however, were powerless to worry her to-day, when the
sun shone and the wind blew and the ferns, washed by the rill running
through the culvert under the road, gave forth a delicious moist odour
reminding her of the flower store where her sister Lise had once
been employed. But at length she arose, and after an hour or more of
sauntering the farming landscape was left behind, the crumbling stone
fences were replaced by a well-kept retaining wall capped by a privet
hedge, through which, between stone pillars, a driveway entered and
mounted the shaded slope,