She had not
climbed a hill for a long time and she was panting when she
reached it. There was the scattered playhouse--it might have lain
there untouched for a quarter of a century--just as her angry feet
had kicked it to pieces. On a root of the beech she sat down and
the broad rim of her hat scratched the trunk of it and annoyed
her, so she took it off and leaned her head against the tree,
looking up into the underworld of leaves through which a sunbeam
filtered here and there--one striking her hair which had darkened
to a duller gold--striking it eagerly, unerringly, as though it
had started for just such a shining mark. Below her was outspread
the little town--the straggling, wretched little town--crude,
lonely, lifeless! She could not be happy in Lonesome Cove after
she had known the Gap, and now her horizon had so broadened that
she felt now toward the Gap and its people as she had then felt
toward the mountaineers: for the standards of living in the Cove--
so it seemed--were no farther below the standards in the Gap than
they in turn were lower than the new standards to which she had
adapted herself while away.
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