But winds and snows disappear, and again life leaps into pasture-land. A yellow light glowing between branches foreruns the green on brown stalk and tree. The meadow-lark lifts his buoyant note in the air, and the farmer clears his field and manures his furrow with sleepy bonfires and the ashes of dead stalks. Earth springs to vital show in slender grasses and rose-red verbena, and the pale canary of the bastard indigo. In this great folkland of the Big Muddy, which is beyond praise in the ordinary phrase of men, there live alongside many other types, a peculiar man and woman. They are--to repeat, for clearness’ sake--only two of many types there indwelling, for it is true of these parts as was said of England in 1755: “You see more people in the roads than in all Europe, and more uneasy countenances than are to be found in the world besides.” The man is seen in all our longitudes; the woman is rarely in any other milieu. She is a product of her city and town. The women of the country have ever before them queryings of the facts of life, the great lessons and slow processes of nature, the depth and feeling of country dwelling. But this city-woman suffers from shallowness and warp through her unknowledge of nature and the unsympathy with fellow humans that protection in bourgeois comfort engenders. She is inexperienced in the instructive adventure of the rich and the instructive suffering of the poor. The basis of her life is conventional. The dollar to her eyes is apt to measure every value. Let us not forget that in the history of the world this is no new estimate. It was the ancient Sabine poet who advised “make money--honestly if we can, if not, dishonestly--only, make money.” “This is the money-got mechanic age,” cried Ben Jonson in Elizabeth’s day. And the poet of the “Elegy written in a Country Church-Yard” more than one hundred and fifty years ago wrote to his friend Wharton: “It is a foolish Thing that one can’t only not live as one pleases, but where and with whom one pleases, without Money.... Money is Liberty, and I fear money is Friendship too and Society, and almost every external Blessing.” Lacking simplicity this woman is submerged in artificiality and false conceptions of life values. Her hair, often blondined and curled in fluffy ringlets, is filleted with gold-mounted combs above a countenance fine-featured and a trifle hardened. Her well-formed hands, even in daily comings and goings, are flashing with rings. She loves to turn the precious stones and watch them divide the light. These jewels are her first expression of accumulating wealth--these and the pelts of animals difficult to capture, and therefore costly. After obtaining these insignia of opulence she begins to long for a third--the gentle, inept riot and solitary Phorcides’s eye for seeing life which she calls “society.”