His being was fairly rooted in the soil, and the animal happiness it offered—the free play of instinct, the sweetness of being physically and emotionally at peace with environment—was the only happiness he had ever known. Vaguely yet surely he had felt the world of men and works, the artificial world, to contain something larger and more beautiful than this. Julia Roth had been to him a stimulating symbol of this higher, this more desirable thing. His love for her had been the soil in which his aspirations had grown. That love had turned to bitterness and lust, and his aspirations had led him among greeds and fears and struggles that differed from those of the wild things only in that they were covert and devious, lacking the free beauty of instinct fearlessly followed and the dignity of open battle. Of civilization he had encountered only the raw and ugly edge, which is uglier than savagery. He knew no more of the true spirit of it than a man who has camped in a farmer’s back pasture knows of the true spirit of wildness. It had treated him without mercy and brought out the worst of him. And yet because he had once loved and dreamed he could not go back to the easy but limited satisfactions of the soil and be wholly content. So he could not make up his mind at first to surrender, but in the next few days one thing after another came to tempt him that way. MacDougall made him an offer for his lands which to his surprise was a little better than the last one. He learned afterward that the over-shrewd lawyer had misinterpreted his trip to New York, imagining that he had gone there to interest eastern capital in his lands. His mother and sister were two very cogent arguments in favour of selling. The Dona Delcasar, a simple and vain old lady, now regarded herself as a woman of wealth, and was always after him for money. Her ambition was to build a house in the Highlands and serve tea at four o’clock (although it was thick chocolate she liked) and break into society. His one discussion of the matter with her was a bitter experience. “Holy Mary!” she exclaimed in her shrill Spanish, when he broached a plan of retrenchment, “What a son I have! You spend thousands on yourself, chasing women and buying automobiles, and now you want us to spend the rest of our lives in this old house and walk to church so that you can make it up. God, but men are selfish!” He saw that if he tried to save money and make a fight for his lands he would have to struggle not only with MacDougall and the weather, but with two ignorant, ambitious and sharp-tongued women. And family pride here fought against him. He did not want to see his women folk go shabbily in the town. He wanted them to have their brick house and their tea parties, and to uphold the name of Delcasar as well as they might.