Up and down the slope at her left, the mountain cable-cars kept steep and endless shuttling. At her feet the serried lights of Holyoke Highlands brightened. Far to the south the concentration of radiance she knew to be Springfield glowed clearer on the horizon. Yet none of these, nor the stars, nor the fresh new moon, held the attraction of those dots of brave, optimistic twinkle where isolated homes were scattered upon the face of a night-shrouded valley floor. Was that it—the thing that troubled her—the lights of other people’s homes?
She did not wonder that heaven was peaceful, that God could be calm and omnipotent, high above the world. The spot and the panorama was an allegory. Yes, the earth was beautiful—very beautiful. She had always known it so. She knew it now a hundredfold. The pain came from wondering about her part in it, and of it, even as in her school life she remained the spectator though virilely the participant.
Waltz music from the Summit House drifted down to her. The world was hers, all its lights and laughter, all its fine rare things, all its rewards and fairies. No, the world was nothing of the sort! She was a mendicant, a Nobody. Always a Nobody. How could she ever forget that? So her moods played upon her. This at seventeen.
For Madelaine Theddon at seventeen, on a mountain height in the starlight, was as surely the Madelaine Theddon whom One Man found gloriously, as the sand-crusted diamond in the Kaffir’s girdle is the same burst of iridescent whiteness on Milady’s finger at Delmonico’s.
Madelaine, on the rock, wondered about the future, what she should do in the world, what niche she should fill. At times she felt a wild, instinctive impulse to attempt great tasks,—build, win, create, worship vast gods. Then her own weakness, namelessness, impotency, would overwhelm her. She must be attached to something substantial to do great work. Some one must have emphatic need of her. In these last moods she felt that building, winning, creating, worshiping vast gods, was all hollow nonsense,—tinsel and mummery. She only wanted to complement. But what she wanted to complement she could not decide, even if she could reach that far in her self-analysis. She was flowering indeed, but she was still seventeen.
The evening deepened. The afterglow—even the leaden afterglow—died on the hills. The stars and moon rode close. Lethe-like, exotic scents wandered through the upper air, no longer earthbound, soaring onward and upward to sweeten the reaches of infinity.
She was not in love, not at seventeen, despite encroaching maturity. Boys she knew, even the best of them, were calloused, independent, painfully sophisticated young hoydens whose principal invocation to the opposite sex was “Say!” And yet that restive, insatiable hunger to complement—the finest, grandest heritage of true womanhood—was gnawing. Gnawing pitifully.
Yet if she were not in love, love was in her,—blind, wingless, already beginning to look up through the latticed windows of cloistered maidenhood, observe the stars, long for freedom without knowing exactly what she would do with freedom if it were suddenly accorded her. Dreams came to her in detached hours, vague, breeze-wafted, miracle-laden. But when she tried to lay hold upon those dreams, make them over into conformity with reality, the world veered askew. She seemed to abrase her delicate soul in the enforced juxtaposition.
II
The “crowd”, regardless of proper chaperonage, had to be back in Mount Hadley at nine o’clock. But the girl stayed there on the ledge until the final moment of departure. Alarmed companions, missing her, searched the mountain top, calling her name.