They reached the vantage place; despite the fitful waverings of the horizon air, they saw the star's golden torch drag fierily over the tree-fretted heights of Shadow Mountain. There was a sullen reddish smolder over the face of this alien sun; but the brief glimpse of the burning visitant from southern skies was an unforgettable experience.
"If we could only watch it from the old top of the mountain."
"The old top, Pelham?"
He traced Nathaniel Guild's idea of the mighty sky-piercing ridge that had once united the iron strata of this crest and the West Adamsville one, with an overlap of sandstone whose grayed relics still crumbled in the small hills flanking the two iron ranges.
"It shrivels our puny importance, doesn't it, dear, to think of the former majesty of these hills!"
"We're as important to ourselves, Pelham."
Together in spirit they climbed the airy darkness that had been the old mountain; their fancies winged back to the shaken ages before man's weak restlessness hid in trees and caves, and came out into the open, to clear away and shape the forests, and split apart the everlasting hills for the malleable wealth hid within them.
But the ecstatic moods could not last forever. The graying embers of the strike re-won their efforts; the inevitable selfishnesses and littlenesses of life came in, to break the filmy web of romance and delight. Man can stay on the high peaks, whether of spirituality or intellect, of surging emotion or unstrung sentiment, but a little while; their rarefied atmosphere, the height of man's upward groping, will not sustain vigorous animal life. When such moments come, if we are in tune we pass into their magnetic sway whole-heartedly; let the little daily frets, the appetites and prejudices, be in control, and the height is unclimbed, the high emotion lifting another passes unnoticed over our stooping backs.
The two differing personalities found life together a perpetual welter of adjustment. Insofar as they were adaptable, these adjustments were easy; but neither his training, as a favored first son, nor her self-sure nature, helped cushion the continual shocks. Neither had reached the opinionated thirties, when inconsiderate habits have rutted too deeply to permit habitual considerateness; but the two determined wills had no easy task to come to agreement upon even small details of the home life.
Pelham's "picturesque" pipes, as he reminded her the unmarried Jane had always described them, showed a depraved tendency to roost wherever their master finished with them.