"Much better not, I should think. You needed surgeons."
"Just what I didn't need! I should have liked to die in a country that had something to say for itself. I don't feel as though this place had ever existed, except in some hideous dream."
"It's not hideous. It's even very beautiful—so wild and untouched; such lovely contours to the mountains."
"Yes, it's very untouched." She spoke of it with just the same scorn I had in old days heard her use for certain novelists. "Scarcely worth the trouble of touching I should think—shouldn't you?"
"The beauty of it last night and this morning has knocked me over," I replied hardily.
"Oh, really! How very interesting!" By which she meant that she was not interested at all.
"You mean that you would like it landscape-gardened?" Really, she was perverse. She had turned her back to the view—which was ripping, out of her northern window. I could tell that she habitually turned her back on it.
"Oh, landscape-gardened? Well, it would improve it, no doubt. But it would take generations to do it. The generations that have been here already don't seem to have accomplished much. Humanly speaking, they have hardly existed at all."
Kathleen Somers was no snob in the ordinary sense. She was an angel to peasants. I knew perfectly what she meant by "humanly." She meant there was no castle on the next hill.
"Are you incapable of caring for nature—just scenery?"