But he remained sober. "Tell me," he asked, after a time, "what it is about this country--I mean other than friendships, of course--that gets under a fellow's soul and lifts it--to the end that he wants to remain here? I know there is something, though I can't for the life of me place it. What is it, anyway?" She turned upon him sharply. "Do you really feel that way?" she asked, evidently pleased. "I feel that way. But why do I feel that way? What is it? You know what I mean. There is something--there must be!" "I know what you mean--yes," she replied, thoughtfully. "Yet I doubt if I myself, even after all these years, can define it. What you 'feel' must be our atmosphere--its rarity, its power to exhilarate. Though that really doesn't explain it. I reckon it's the same thing--only much more healthful, more soulful--that one feels in large cities after nightfall. I mean, the glare of your incandescent lights. I honestly believe that that glare, more than any other single thing, holds throngs of people to an existence not only unnatural, but laden with a something that crushes as well." She was silent. Again Stephen felt the strange pull on his interest, but he said nothing. After a time she went on. "City-dwellers," she explained, "don't begin their day till the approach of dark. It's true of both levels of society, too--lower as well as upper. And I believe the reason for this lies, as I have said, in the atmosphere--their man-made atmosphere--just as the secret of your feeling the way you do lies in our atmosphere--God-made. Were this atmosphere suddenly to disappear, both out of your cities and out of my deserts, both your world and my own would lose all of their charm." Stephen bestirred himself. "What psychology do you find in that?" he asked, dwelling upon the fact that she knew his East so well. "Merely the effect of softening things--for the soul as well as the eye--through the eye, indeed, to the soul. Our atmosphere here does that--softens the houses, and the trees, and the cattle, and the mountains, and the distant reaches. It softens our nights, too. Perhaps you have noticed it? How everything appears shrouded in a kind of hazy, mellow, translucent something that somehow reacts upon you? I have. And I believe that is the secret of one's wanting to remain in the country, once he has exposed himself to it. It is a kind of spell--a hypnosis. When out of it one wants to get back into it.