Lolita hopped clumsily on to Pearl’s shoulder and tweaked her ear.  “Hell and damnation!” she muttered, and then sang: 

     “Love me to-day,
        Love me an hour.”

Pearl shrugged impatiently.  “Shut up!” she cried, and resting her chin in her cupped hands gazed over the sparkling, shimmering plain, where all unshadowed day-beams seemed to gather as pure light and then, as if fused in some magic alembic, became color.  There, the ineffable command:  “Let there be light!” included all.  It is only in the silence and light of the desert that men may fully realize that the universe is one, that light is music and music is color and color is fragrance, undifferentiated in the eternal harmony of beauty.

Pearl’s eyes drank the desert, unconsciously seeking there in its haunting enigmas and unsolved mysteries an answer to the enigma of self.  Like life, like truth, like love, like all realities viewed from the angle of human vision, the desert is a paradox.  Its vast emptiness is more than full; its unashamed sterility is but the simile for unmeasured fecundity.

For an hour thus she leaned and gazed, Lolita restlessly walking back and forth, singing and croaking, until, at last, as Pearl had predicted, Bob Flick appeared, a fact not unheralded by Lolita’s cries; but Pearl did not alter her languid pose, nor even turn her head to greet him.  She was watching a whirling column of sand, polished and white as a colossal marble pillar.

“It’s kind of early for them to begin, ain’t it, Bob?” she remarked casually.

“Yes.”  He paused by the gate, leaning one arm on it, and in the swift glance she cast at him from the corners of her eyes she could see that his expressionless face looked worn, the lines about the mouth seemed to have deepened and the eyes were heavy, as if he had not slept.

Lolita had, as usual, perched upon his shoulder, and was murmuring in his ear.

“Say, Pearl,” Flick spoke again after an interval of silence, “I wish you’d take a walk with me.  I—­I got something on my mind that I want to talk about.”

“All right,” she acquiesced readily, the nicker of a smile about her lips quickly suppressed.  “I’ll be ready in a minute, as soon as I get my hat.”

They walked through the village, the great broken wall of the mountains rising before them, deceptively near, and yet austerely remote, dazzling snow domes and spires crowning the rock-buttressed slopes and appearing sometimes to float, as unsubstantial clouds, in an atmosphere of all commingling and contrasting blues and purples.  Presently they turned into a lane of mesquite trees.  The growth of these trees was thick on either side and the branches arched above their heads.  They had stepped in a footfall’s space into a new world.  It was one of those surprising, almost unbelievable contrasts in which the desert abounds.

A moment before they had gazed upon the mountains, spectacularly vivid in the clear atmosphere, white peaks and azure skies, green foothills, serrated with black shadows.  Behind them the sun-flooded white glare of the great, waste place and behold! all these vanished as they set their feet in this garden inclosed, this bower as green and quiet as the lane of a distant and far softer and more fertile country.