Far away below, cleft along its centre by the irregular black line of its frozen river was the wide white floor of the valley, measuring the mountains that rose upon its hither side. Those high, high summits, beetling variously up into the top of the sky, with bright patches of tawny rock breaking through their smooth whiteness against its darkest blue, knew nothing of the world below where their mountains went downward in a great whiteness of broadening irregular slopes that presently bore pines in single file upwards advancing from the dense clumps upon the lower ridges, and met in an extended mass along the edge of the valley floor. Here and there, clear of the pinewoods, and looking perilously high and desolate, a single châlet made a triangular warm brown blot upon the dazzling snow. In this crystal stillness the smallest sound went easily up to the high peaks; to the high pure blue. Turning to bless the well-placed little hotel she met a frontage of blank windows, each with its sharply jutting balcony, jaws, dropped beneath the blind stare of the windows set forever upon a single scene. Hotel; queer uncherished thing. No one to share its life and make it live. On a near table was a folded newspaper, thin, heavily printed, continental. Switzerland radiant all about her and the Swiss world within her hands—a reprieve from further seeing and a tour, into the daily life of this country whose living went on within a setting that made even the advertisements look lyrical. The simple text was enthralling. For years she had not so delighted in any reading. In the mere fact of the written word, in the building of the sentences, the movement of phrases linking part with part. It was all quite undistinguished, a little crude and hard; demanding, seeming to assume a sunny hardness in mankind. And there was something missing whose absence was a relief, like the absence of heaviness in the air. Everything she had read stood clear in her mind that yet, insufficiently occupied with the narrative and its strange emanations, caught up single words and phrases and went off independently touring, climbing to fresh arrangements and interpretations of familiar thought. And this miracle of renewal was the work of a single night. The need for expression grew burdensome in the presence of the empty sun-blistered tables. Perhaps these lively clarities would survive a return journey through the hotel? Voices sounded up from below, from the invisible roadway. English laughter, of people actively diverting themselves in the winter landscape. Far away within each one was the uncommunicating English spirit, heedless, but not always unaware, filling its day with habitual, lively-seeming activities. The laughter sounded insincere; as if defying a gloom it refused to face.