"You aren't going back to the West, Isabelle?" Margaret asked, while they waited for the motor. "Won't you miss it?"
"Miss the West? Did you ever know a woman that had escaped from the Mississippi Valley who would go back there?" Conny drawled. "Why, Belle is like a girl just out of school, looking at the shop windows!"
Cornelia Woodyard, who had lived a number of years in a corner of that same vast valley, looked from metropolitan heights on the monotony of the "middle West." She had the New Yorker's amusing incapacity to comprehend existence outside the neighborhood of Fifth Avenue and Central Park.
"One lives out there," Margaret protested with sudden fire, "in those great spaces. Men grow there. They do things. When my boys are educated I shall take them away from New York, to the Virginia mountains, perhaps, and have them grow up there, doing things, real things, working with their hands, becoming men! Perhaps not there," she mused, recollecting that the acres of timber and coal in the mountains, her sons' inheritance from her vigorous ancestors, had been lost to them in a vulgar stock dealer's gamble by their father,—"perhaps out to Oregon, where I have an uncle. His father rode his horse all the way from Louisiana across the continent, after the War! He had nothing but his horse—and before he died he built a city in his new country. That is where men do things!"
Margaret had flashed into life again. As Tom Cairy would have said, "Vraiment, ma petite cousine a une grande ame—etouffee" (For Cairy always made his acute observations in the French tongue).
"There's something of the Amazon in you, Margaret," Conny remarked, "in spite of your desire to seclude yourself in the Windward Islands with a suitable mate."
The motor finally came puffing up the drive, and the women stood on the veranda, prolonging their farewells. A round, red, important sun peeped from under the gray cloud bank that had lowered all the afternoon, flooding the thin branches of the budding trees, falling warm and gold across the dead fields.
"See!" Margaret cried, raising her thin arms to the sun. "The Promise!"
"I hope it will hold until we reach Jerome Avenue," Conny replied practically, preparing to enter the car.
"The promise of another life!"