The Land of Content

by Edith Barnard Delano

From their first meeting on the mountain-top Flood and Ogilvie had intuitively liked each other. Through a knowledge of varied types of men, they had learned to look beneath the surface; each recognized in the other many qualities to respect. Men are by nature hero-worshipers, from the time that they look with covetous admiration on the policeman's brass buttons and the motorman's thrilling power, through the period when they worship the home league's star pitcher and third-base-man, the captain of their college foot-ball eleven, and on to their political enthusiasms. There is far more of pure hero-worship in the friendships of men than the world gives them credit for. Flood and Ogilvie had met on a mountain-top, and on a height their friendship was to remain. Each saw in the other "a splendid fellow"; neither would have admitted in his friend the least shadow of baseness. So, after the unforeseen disclosure of that look, each man felt generously on his honor to appear unaware of any possible feeling on the part of his friend toward Rosamund, even going so far, in his heart and hopes, as to deny that such might exist.

But while this ardent liking existed between Flood and Ogilvie, there was something far different between each of them and Pendleton.

Pendleton liked Flood. He liked him for the virile strength of his personality, as well as for his possessions; he knew him only in his hours of leisure, and might not have liked him so well, nor at all, if he had known him only when he was engrossed in business. But toward Ogilvie he could not disguise an antagonism which would have shown itself openly if he had been more courageous, and which as it was, appeared in countless small spitefulnesses.

To the man who does nothing there are no creatures less interesting than those whose every moment is taken up with affairs. Between the deliberate idler and the man of absorbing occupation there can be nothing in common; indeed, there often arises more or less antipathy. The business man is apt to retain a hearty disrespect for the idler; to him, the man of leisure must always appear an anomaly, an excrescence, a parasite of civilization. And even when the worker has developed toward the plane of the connoisseur, the collector, the lover of sports and arts, he seldom does more than tolerate the man who has begun where he finds himself only toward the end of an active career.

Yet Flood found Marshall amusing and likable enough. He was perfectly aware of Pendleton's qualities of the sycophant, the flatterer, the gatherer of crumbs from the rich man's table. He thought of them rather pityingly as a natural outgrowth of the life of that class in which Pendleton was so much at his ease, and regarded them leniently because he believed that there was also to be found in that class so much that was desirable, so much that he himself coveted. He was willing to accept its evil with its good, its defects with its excellence; if it had brought forth a Pendleton, it had also borne the perfect flower that was Rosamund.

But to Ogilvie Pendleton was altogether an abomination; he could see no good in him; his very palms itched to smite him!

They were fortunate in their weather. It seemed as if nature, satisfied with her latest marvel, were holding her breath. Every day of their ten was brilliantly clear and cold and windless. Their voices rang far across the white silence of valley and mountain in that hushed atmosphere. The frozen snow crunched even under Timmy's little trudging feet; and the mountain people apparently felt that it was useless to lurk among the spruces when every step they took told where they would be hidden. They came from far and wide to stare at the strange antics of the "foreigners," and grinned at Rosamund, more friendly than they had ever been before.

Pap drove Mother Cary across the valley to look on at the sports; Rosamund called her attention to the new friendliness of the other spectators. The old woman smiled rather grimly. "Land! No wonder!" she said. "Nobody could suspicion those young fellers were spies, cuttin' up sech capers as them, sliding down hill head foremost on their stummicks, an' prancin' around on slappers. I never saw such goin's on, myself—and John Ogilvie one of 'em!"

They laughingly compared notes afterward, and decided that Mother Cary had been quite scandalized by their "capers;" Ogilvie admitted that she had been very severe toward him the day after her drive across the valley.

But for themselves they were glorious hours. Rosamund threw aside the burden of care that had enveloped her during the past weeks, and became as merry as a child, more gay and joyous, than Ogilvie had ever seen her. She skimmed down the slopes on her toboggan with Tim holding on behind her, his curls blowing out in the onrush of their swift descent; and she would carry him back up the hill again, "pick-a-back," to show him how strong a horse she was. She could outdistance them all on skis, but Ogilvie proved himself the best on snowshoes—thanks to his boyhood in northern Vermont, although Flood, who had faced many a blizzard on the plains, was not far behind him.