She had a desire that the roots of the trees should take hold on her, disintegrate her, find a place for their support and nourishment. A great and horrible yearning took hold on her. She yearned that her emptiness should be filled, she yearned for her Sin, for the bundle that held her Sin, she yearned to nourish her Sin.... She threw herself in the dust of the road and sobbed. The forest repudiated her. The wall of the forest pushed her into the road. She was one with the road. Nothing grew out of her; she nourished nothing. She was a way, to be passed over, trampled upon.... She felt the throbbing ache of her breasts in the dust. She arose and stood quiet, looking sombrely at the dark, unrelenting wall of forest. Then she walked slowly along. Sadly, drearily, the life that lay behind her, the life that she had shut out from her when her feet first set out upon the road, began to filter back into her bruised mind. It came as something she had known long ago, so long that it seemed as though it must have been quite another life, and she another person, a young dreaming girl, moving about in the big white house set on the great planted space up against the forest, learning from a shadowy placid woman who called her daughter the ways of the little world of which she was a part, teased by a shadowy kindly man when the woman was not there to hear, captured by the shadowy grown-up figure of the little boy who had played games with her, come back from school and travel a mysterious young man.... How far away it was, how far and how long, long ago! Slowly, slowly, she walked along the road through the forest, carrying in her the dream fragments of her shattered world. Soon she would come out of the forest and there would be a town and there she would step off the road. She would leave the road that went on ceaselessly, in and out of forest, through towns, and again through forest. [7] Copyright, 1922, by George H. Doran Company. Copyright, 1923, by Edna Bryner. NATALKA’S PORTION[8] By ROSE GOLLUP COHEN (From _The Pictorial Review_) Sabinka lay buried in snow. The hills, the forest, the lake, all lay hard, white, glittering, and the air also glittered and stung and cut.