"Why not?"
"You must see most of it from your windows every day."
"But not with your eyes, Jim!" she cried. "I have everything and I have nothing. There is no meaning to anything we do or see or possess if the one thing we desire is withheld."
"I might have made that speech, Nan," he said thoughtfully. "It sounds strange on your lips."
"With my houses in town and country, with every whim of body and soul apparently gratified, perhaps it does sound strange. But suppose that all this madness of luxury, at which you wonder, is but the vain effort of a hungry heart?"
The man was silent. The question was too dangerous to try to answer, too dangerous to leave unanswered.
"You haven't answered," she insisted.
"No. Answers to such questions don't come so glibly here in these silent places, Nan," he responded seriously.
"That's why I brought you here," she confessed. "Besides, I knew you loved this wild spot. The memory of your rapture that day, sixteen years ago, has never left me."
"You used to love such places, too," he said looking away over the blue billows. "What deep-toned eternal things they spoke! How small and contemptible the struggle of the insects in those valleys below!"