Now she was a grown woman, she told herself, twenty-three years old and had had, she often thought, as full a life as any one of her age could have.  Her college course had been varied with vacations in Europe; she had had one season in society; she was just back from a trip around the world.  Her busy, absorbing life had given her no time to revisit the narrow green Valley where she had spent so many of her childhood’s holidays But now a whim for self-analysis, a desire to learn if the old glamour about the lovely enchanted region still existed for her weary, sophisticated maturity, had made her break exacting social engagements and sent her back alone, from the city, to see how the old valley looked in the spring.

Her disappointment was acute.  The first impression and the one which remained with her, coloring painfully all the vistas of dim woodland aisles and sunlit brooks, was of the meagerness and meanness of the desolate lives lived in this paradise.  This was a fact she had not noticed as a child, accepting the country people as she did all other incomprehensible elders.  They had not seemed to her to differ noticeably from her delicate, esthetic mother, lying in lavender silk negligees on wicker couches, reading the latest book of Mallarme, or from her competent, rustling aunt, guiding the course of the summer colony’s social life with firm hands.  There was as yet no summer colony, this week in May.  Even the big hotel was not open.  Virginia was lodged in the house of one of the farmers.  There was no element to distract her mind from the narrow, unlovely lives of the owners of that valley of beauty.

They were grinding away at their stupefying monotonous tasks as though the miracle of spring were not taking place before their eyes.  They were absorbed in their barnyards and kitchen sinks and bad cooking and worse dressmaking.  The very children, grimy little utilitarians like their parents, only went abroad in the flood of golden sunshine, in order to rifle the hill pastures of their wild strawberries.  Virginia was no longer a child to ignore all this.  It was an embittering, imprisoning thought from which she could not escape even in the most radiant vision of May woods.  She was a woman now, with a trained mind which took in the saddening significance of these lives, not so much melancholy or tragic as utterly neutral, featureless, dun-colored.  They weighed on her heart as she walked and drove about the lovely country they spoiled for her.

What a heavenly country it was!  She compared it to similar valleys in Switzerland, in Norway, in Japan, and her own shone out pre-eminent with a thousand beauties of bold skyline, of harmoniously “composed” distances, of exquisitely fairy-like detail of foreground.  But oh! the wooden packing-boxes of houses and the dreary lives they sheltered!