"What strikes me most," he said, "at least with the people that I see about you, Belle, is the sharp line between work and play. I see you women all at play, and I see the men only when they are wearily watching you play or playing with you. One hears so much about business in America. But with you people it is as much suppressed as if your husbands and brothers went off to some other star every day to do their work and came back at night by air ship to see their families."
"Business is dull," Isabelle explained,—"most men's business. They want to forget it themselves when they leave the office."
"But it is so much a part of life," Vickers protested, thinking of the hours and days Lane spent absorbed in affairs that Isabelle hadn't the curiosity to inquire about.
"Too much over here."
"And not enough."…
On their way home in the cool of the evening, over a hilly road through the leafing woods, their horses walked close together, and Isabelle, putting an arm affectionately on her brother's shoulder, mused:—
"One feels so differently different days. Tell me, Vick, what makes the atmosphere,—the color of life in one's mind? Look over there, along the river. See all the gray mist and up above on the mountain the purple—and to-morrow it will be gone! Changing, always changing! It's just so inside you; the color is changing all the time…. There is the old village. It doesn't seem to me any longer the place you and I lived in as boy and girl, the place I was married from."
"It is we who have changed, not Grafton."
"Of course; it's what we have lived through, felt,—and we can't get back!
We can't get back,—that's the sad thing."
"Perhaps it isn't best to get back altogether."