It came over Sylvia with a passing sense of great strangeness that she had been in this spot for four months and, with the exception of the men at the fire, she had not met, had not spoken to, had not even consciously seen a single inhabitant of the place.

And in the end, she went away in precisely the same state of ignorance.  On the day they drove to the station she did, indeed, give one fleeting glimpse over the edge of her narrow prison-house of self-centered interest.  Surrounded by a great many strapped and buckled pieces of baggage, with Helene, fascinatingly ugly in her serf’s uniform, holding the black leather bag containing Aunt Victoria’s jewels, they passed along the street for the last time, under the great elms already almost wintry with their bare boughs.  Now that it was too late, Sylvia felt a momentary curiosity about the unseen humanity which had been so near her all the summer.  She looked out curiously at the shabby vehicles (it seemed to her that there were more of them than in the height of the season), at the straight-standing, plainly dressed, briskly walking women and children (there seemed to be a new air of life and animation about the street now that most of the summer cottages were empty), and at the lounging, indifferent, powerfully built men.  She wondered, for a moment, what they were like, with what fortitude their eager human hearts bore the annual display of splendor they might never share.  They looked, in that last glimpse, somehow quite strong, as though they would care less than she would in their places.  Perhaps they were only hostile, not envious.

“I dare say,” said Aunt Victoria, glancing out at a buck-board, very muddy as to wheels, crowded with children, “that it’s very forlorn for the natives to have the life all go out of the village when the summer people leave.  They must feel desolate enough!”

Sylvia wondered.

The last thing she saw as the train left the valley was the upland pass between Windward and Hemlock mountains.  It brought up to her the taste of black birch, the formidably clean smell of yellow soap, and the rush of summer wind past her ears.

CHAPTER XXXIII

“WHOM GOD HATH JOINED ...”

They were to sail on the 23d, and ever since the big square invitation had come it had been a foregone conclusion, conceded with no need for wounding words, that there was no way out of attending the Sommerville-Morrison wedding on the 21st.  They kept, of course, no constrained silence about it.  Aunt Victoria detested the awkwardness of not mentioning difficult subjects as heartily as she did the mention of them; and as the tree toad evolves a skin to answer his needs, she had evolved a method all her own of turning her back squarely on both horns of a dilemma.  No, there was no silence about the wedding, only about the possibility that it might be an ordeal, or that the ordeal might be avoided.  It could not be avoided.