Below her were the Home Woods, where Whitewater Brook ran over silver gravel, under mossy logs, pouring into deep, spreading pools, gliding swiftly amid a camouflage of ferns, gushing out over limestone beds to clatter and sparkle and fling rainbow spray across every sunny glade. Eris looked down at the woods. To venture down there was not very good for her low-heeled, white sport shoes.... Of course she could clean them after noon dinner and they’d be dry in time for--anything.... But for _what_? She paused at the wood’s edge, her mind on her shoes. “In time for what?” she repeated aloud. She stood, abstracted, grey eyes brooding the question. What was there to dress for--to clean her white shoes for? Evening service. A slow stroll with some neighbour’s daughter along the village street. Gossip with other young people encountered in the lamp-lit dark. Banter with boys--passing the usual group clustered on fence or wall--jests born of rural wit, empty laughter, emptier retort--the slow stroll homeward.... This was what she dressed for.... Or for a party ... where the deadly familiarity of every face and voice had long since dulled her interest.... Where there was never any mental outlook; no aspiration, no stimulation--no response to her restless curiosity--where nobody could tell her “why.” Standing there on the wood’s edge, she wondered why she was at pains to dress becomingly for the sake of such things as these. She wondered why she cared for her person so scrupulously in a family where a bath a week was the rule--in a community where the drug-store carried neither orange-stick nor depilatory. It is true, however, that with the advent of short skirts and prohibition it was now possible to purchase lipstick and powder-puff in White Hills. And State Troopers had been there twice looking for hootch. There was a rumour in local ecclesiastical circles that the youth of White Hills was headed hellward. * * * * * As yet the sweet-fern was only in tassel; Eris could pick her way, without danger to her stockings, through the strip of rough clearing. She entered the woods, pensively, amid the dappled shadows of new leaves. Everywhere her eyes discovered young ferns and wild blossoms. Trillium and bunch-berry were still in bloom; viburnum, too; violets, blue, yellow and white; and a few pink moccasin flowers and late anemones. Birds, too, sang everywhere; crows were noisy in the taller pines; glimpses of wood-thrush and Veery in moist thickets; clear little ecstasies of bird-song from high branches, the strident chirring of red squirrels, the mysterious, muffled drumming of a cock-grouse far in woodland depths. Where a mossy limestone ledge hung low over Whitewater Brook, Eris spread her handkerchief and sat down on it carefully, laying her book beside her. Here the stillness was melodious with golden harmonies from a little waterfall.