Her opponent, this potent, significant personality, lounging on the bench beside her, resting in the interval of a life the intensity of which was out of her world altogether, the life, all power, of a modern rich man in great affairs; controlling vast forces, swaying and shaping the lives of thousands of weaker men as no potentate had ever done, living in the instants he allowed himself for personal life (she felt again the pang of her sympathy for his look of fierce, inexplicable pain) with a concentration in harmony with the great scale of his other activities.  It was, just as the cheap novels called it, a sort, a bad, inhuman, colorful, fascinating sort of modern version of the superman’s life, she reflected.  She had been ridiculous to project her village insignificance into that large-scale landscape.

A distant whistle blew a long, full note, filling the valley with its vibrations.

“Is that a train, at this hour?” murmured Mr. Welles.  His voice was sunk to a somnolent monotone, his hands folded over his waistcoat moved slowly and rhythmically with his breathing.  It was evident that he did not in the least care whether it was a train or not.

“Oh no!” said Marise, severely, disapproving the vagueness and inaccuracy of his observation.  “That’s the mill-whistle, blowing the closing-hour.  You’re no true Ashleyan, not to have learned the difference between the voices of the different whistles of the day.”

She turned to Marsh, tilting her wings for a capricious flight.  “I think it’s part of the stubborn stiff-jointedness of human imagination, don’t you, that we don’t hear the beauty of those great steam-whistles.  I wonder if it’s not unconscious art that gave to our mighty machines such voices of qower.”

“Isn’t it perhaps ostentatious to call the family saw-mill a ’mighty machine’?” inquired Marsh mildly.  He sat at the end of the bench, his arm along the back behind Mr. Welles, his head turned to the side, his soft hat pulled low over his forehead, looking at the garden and at Marise out of half-shut, sleepy eyes.

Marise went on, drawing breath for a longer flight.  “When the train comes sweeping up the valley, trailing its great beautiful banner of smoke, I feel as though it were the crescendo announcing something, and at the crossing, when that noble rounded note blares out . . . why, it’s the music for the setting.  Nothing else could cope with the depth of the valley, the highness and blackness of its mountain walls, and the steepness of the Eagle Rocks.”

“I call that going some, ’noble rounded note’!” murmured Marsh, lifting his eyebrows with a visible effort and letting his eyes fall half shut, against the brilliance of the sunshine.

Marise laughed, and persisted.  “Just because its called a steam-whistle, we won’t hear its beauty and grandeur, till something else has been invented to take its place, and then we’ll look back sentimentally and regret it.”