The days were growing unnumbered by this time, measure of time being only necessary when one has daily petty duties, and existence is not a continuous, untroubled joy. Arthur positively bloomed; even Derwent seemed a shade less anxious for the souls of men, and Mr. Wemyss a point less analytic. And the morning was one to bring a bit of fresh color to the cheek of a very Tannhäuser who had been long years jaded with Venus’s joys, his dull eyes rested with the lights of earth again, his ear soothed by notes of spring and human love. The land was beautiful with bud-promise, the air steeped with joyous light of life. And the girls came down to breakfast, looking each and all a Hebe. For the will of the world comes out in this--that all that has to do with life, new life, charms and attracts us; that all that speaks of over-thought, of over-soul, if you will, is wan and weird--either positively uncanny, or laughable, like the chorus of old men in Faust! Instinctively, we all turn to the flower, to the fresh looks of the young girl, to the rosy lips, full of the promise of future life. No wrinkled wisdom, no sorrowful lines of character, can make up for this. The first thoughtless girl we meet shows her _beauté du diable_ more than a match for all the crow’s-feet of the intellect. And this is the magnetism of vitality; it is your full-blooded man that the masses of the world delight to follow. The unthinking are repelled by too much consciousness, as by disease. We all have known such sunny mornings, when we that are living live, and the dead lie dead in their churchyards. Gayly the party mounted; and the strong horses galloped over the roads. They were still in the broad valley of the Hudson; far behind them lay the river, unseen, but farther still was visible yet the blue film of the Catskills. They crossed a broad intervale, and ahead of them was a gap in the hills, over which the road wound in a sort of pass. And now as they galloped up it in the shadow of the elms it was as if they had gone through a narrow door into a different country; the scene changed, the hills grew small, rugged, and broken; the vegetation was less rich; they were in New England. So marked was it that Wemyss pointed out the change; even the color of the houses was not the same, nor the look of the barns. They were small and neat, and painted sternly white; the very gates were better hung, and the sidewalks more neatly trimmed; the squalid, unkempt look was gone, and with it the greater luxuriance. One no longer felt the vastness of the Continent, but seemed to be in an older corner of it, the bars not yet let down, where elbow-room was less, and ideas and conventions artificially preserved. The hills were smaller, and the trees looked stunted; human habitations had a look like an old dress which the wearer in her penury still struggled to keep neat. Arthur was reminded at once of the look of the land about the hill-town to which he had driven on that day with Gracie.