There is a place called an Inn above a city in the mountains—it was built only a few years ago by a man with a Brobdingnagian imagination—a huge pile of bowlders, tunneled and dragged down from the mountain sides and put together as if the ages had soldered them into a great castle. The walls within are rough and covered with strange scripts, fragments of great lines from great poets, sentences from philosophers and saints. It is not a place for tourists, but for people weary with the strife of living, made obedient to peace and silence by exhaustion.
I have seen this place. It is marvelous, and strangely effective morally. Bad people get a somnambulant look there, because they are sleepwalking in their virtues. They get a look of naïve innocence; or, if the system of moral compensation in them is broken, they take a horrified look around and escape on the next train.
One morning, so early that the day was still a gray cavern between earth and sky with the wild March winds whirling in it, a slender woman descended from a taxicab at the gateway to the drive which led down the mountain slope to this Inn. She wore a blue coat with a fur collar drawn close about her fair face, a small fur hat with an exceeding vivid rose tucked into the band of thicker fur around the crown and fitted so snugly that a mere line of her bright hair showed beneath. She had eyes the color of blue flowers, paler than violets, the kind that always look up at you meaningly from the cold ground in March—but you do not know what they mean—exactly as this woman’s eyes looked upward and abroad now beneath the narrow sweeping line of her swallow-winged brows.
She was not young; she was touched with the same sadness of those pale blue flowers above the winter earth. But she appeared young in this half light of the early dawn. Any man at the sight of her, swinging gracefully down the winding road between the naked trees, beneath the pearling skies of daybreak, might have conceived the idea of courting her. But he would have dismissed it instantly after a nearer reading look. He would have perceived that she was already “taken,” that she belonged either to a man or to his children. She was not in the possessive case.
She loitered along the way, as one familiar with this place, looking for remembered things, ferns between the rocks, puffs of green moss above these rocks, flashes of wild azalea deeply bowered among the laurel bushes, tall stalks of shooting star blossoms white against the gray bluff, and a path leading from the roadway up the side of the bluff. I suppose there is not even one little high place on this earth which has not somewhere upon it a path that goes to the top. And frequently the idlest people in the world make them. It is due to the futile persistence of the altar instinct in them.
She had come down into the paved plaza in front of the Inn before the porter carrying her bags overtook her. She followed him through the door and paused at the breath-taking majesty of this huge room. Filled with guests, its dignity was diminished; but bare and solemn and silent in this early morning hour, it was tremendous. She cast a glance upward at the rough walls, scrolled over with those mighty texts taken from the Scriptures that men have made for themselves, but not one from Moses or the Prophets—the idea being, I suppose, not to open the bleeding wounds of conscience in many guests by reminders too authoritatively worded about their sins and trespasses.
She caught sight of one at last from Marcus Aurelius as if she had been looking for it. The wisdom of it did not apply to her case, but it soothed her for that reason, because she remembered it as an exit she used to take from her unhappy thoughts during those first months of her unnatural widowhood. When you are bedridden within by a secret grief, these old negative philosophers are very good drug doctors for your complaints. This is why so many miserable women take to the narcotics of theosophy and other forms of recumbent mysticisms. They are mental opiates.
“Good morning, Mrs. Cutter! Glad to see you back here,” the night clerk said, smiling sleepy-eyed at her as she approached the desk. He swung the register around and offered her a pen.
“You received my wire?” she asked, when she had written her name.
“Yes, and fortunately we were able to reserve the same room for you,” he answered, evidently referring to a request which she had wired.