On the shore of the long blue lake that mirrored eternally, a clear, cool sky and immense dark trees--pines and cedars--Angela felt that a line had been drawn between her and her California past, with its flame of golden, poppies and flowers of the forest. Here she had reached a high note of beauty which rang crystalline as a silver rod striking upon ice. The place gave Angela a sense of purity and remoteness which she had felt by no lake-shore of Europe. The charm of other lakes had been their villa-sprinkled shores, their historical associations. The charm of Tahoe was loneliness. She liked to row out on the water alone, and rest on her oars to look down, down, through miles (it seemed) of liquid sapphire and emerald blending together. Tahoe was not remote, really since luxurious trains had brought it into close touch with San Francisco and with the East; but Angela liked to cultivate the impression of remoteness as if she were a nun in retreat, and the beauty was of a kind that called to her spirit, making renunciation easier than in the luscious south, scented with lilies and roses. Tahoe had its roses, too; but its chief perfume was of pines and the pure freshness of breezes that blow over water and snow mountains. The journey, too, had prepared her for the isolation that she craved; the glimpse of tragic Donner Lake, where the pioneers starved and agonized in 1848; the wild Truckee River sweeping its flood past thickets of pale sagebrush and forests of black pines; the tang of cold and the smell of snow in the air; the lonely farmhouses folded among green hills; and the primitive look of Truckee town with its little frame buildings called by pretentious foreign names; Firenze Saloon; Roma Hotel. Nobody else, however, seemed to have the half-sad, half-delicious sense of remoteness from the world, at Tahoe, which Angela had. That month was very gay, and the immense verandas of the tavern were flower-gardens of pretty girls--those American "summer girls," of whom Angela had often heard. They swam, and boated and fished, and, above all, flirted, for there were always plenty of men; and in the evenings they danced in the ballroom of the casino, built on the edge of the water. Angela never tired of going from end to end of the lake in the steamboat that set out from the tavern jetty in the morning and returned in the afternoon. The captain, a great character, let her sit in a room behind the pilot-box, where her luncheon was brought by an eager-eyed youth working his way through college by serving as steward in the holidays. He was in love with a girl at his university, equally poor and equally plucky; but because she was earning dollars as a waitress at the tavern, the boy thought Tahoe a place "where you couldn't help being happy." Angela thought it a place where, more than most others, it might be possible to find peace, though happiness was gone.