"This?" She stroked the idol. "It is rather lovely, Father got it in Benares. The carving is very cunningly done. Look at the nose and mouth. The rank Hinduism of the thing amuses me. Perhaps it was cruel to bring it up here where there are no other gods for it to play with. But it's all I've got. They had to sell everything, you know. When I get stronger, I'll send it back to New York and sell it too." "Why did you keep it out of all the things you had?" "I don't know. I think it was the first thing we ever bought in India. And I remember Benares with so much pleasure. Wasn't it a pity we couldn't have been there when everything happened?" "Much better not, I should think. You needed surgeons." "Just what I didn't need! I should have liked to die in a country that had something to say for itself. I don't feel as though this place had ever existed, except in some hideous dream." "It's not hideous. It's even very beautiful--so wild and untouched; such lovely contours to the mountains." "Yes, it's very untouched." She spoke of it with just the same scorn I had in old days heard her use for certain novelists. "Scarcely worth the trouble of touching I should think--shouldn't you?" "The beauty of it last night and this morning has knocked me over," I replied hardily. "Oh, really! How very interesting!" By which she meant that she was not interested at all. "You mean that you would like it landscape-gardened?" Really, she was perverse. She had turned her back to the view--which was ripping, out of her northern window. I could tell that she habitually turned her back on it. "Oh, landscape-gardened? Well, it would improve it, no doubt. But it would take generations to do it. The generations that have been here already don't seem to have accomplished much. Humanly speaking, they have hardly existed at all." Kathleen Somers was no snob in the ordinary sense. She was an angel to peasants. I knew perfectly what she meant by "humanly." She meant there was no castle on the next hill. "Are you incapable of caring for nature--just scenery?" "Quite." She closed her eyes, and stopped her gentle, even stroking of the idol. "Of course you never did see America first," I laughed. Kathleen Somers opened her eyes and spoke vehemently. "I've seen all there is of it to see, in transit to better places. Seeing America first! That can be borne. It's seeing America last that kills me. Seeing nothing else forever, till I die." "You don't care for just beauty, regardless," I mused. "Not a bit. Not unless it has meant something to man. I'm a humanist, I'm afraid." Whether she was gradually developing remorse for my night in the cobwebby barn, I do not know. But anyhow she grew more gentle, from this point on. She really condescended to expound.