And all of them bowed before and struggling
under economic forces which they did not understand, working and
planning, according to their lights, to fulfill the law of their
being, seeking through the means at hand to secure the means of
livelihood in obedience to the universal will to live, the human
desire to lay firm hold of life, liberty, such happiness as could be
grasped.
Hollister would sit in the evening on the low stoop before his cabin
and Doris would sit beside him with her hand on his knee. A spirit of
drowsy content would rest upon them. Hollister's eyes would see the
river, gray now with the glacial discharge, slipping quietly along
between the fringes of alder and maple, backed by the deeper green of
the fir and cedar and groves of enormous spruce. His wife's ears drank
in the whispering of the stream, the rumbling of distant waterfalls,
and her warm body would press against him with an infinite suggestion
of delight. At such times he felt the goodness of being alive, the
mild intoxication of the fragrant air which filled the valley, the
majestic beauty of those insentient hills upon which the fierce
midsummer sun was baring glacial patches that gleamed now like blue
diamonds or again with a pale emerald sheen, in a setting of worn
granite and white snowdrifts five thousand feet above.
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