Here on their tree-encircled rink they were together all day as in a room. Passing and re-passing each other all day long. Held together by the enchantment of this continuous gliding. Everyone seemed to be gliding easily about. Only here and there a beginner shuffled along with outstretched jerking arms and anxious face. It was skating escaped from the niggardly opportunities of England and grown perfect. Long sweeping curves; dreaming eyes seraphic, even the sternest betrayed by the enchantment in their eyes. There were many of these in this English crowd. Many who knew there was absurdity in the picture of grown persons sweeping gravely about for hours on end. Only a great enchantment could keep them in countenance and keep them going on. Envy approached and stared her in the face. But only for a moment. She could skate, rather better than the beginners. In a day or two she could be sweeping enchantedly about. It was a temptation answered before it presented itself, only presenting itself because it could move more quickly than thought: to be racing about on a sled was a reckless flouting of the prescribed programme, but innocent, begun in forgetfulness. To have come and seen, to sit and stroll about each day just seeing, would have been joy enough. But when she looked across from the grey crowded rink and its belt of ragged bare trees to the mountains standing in full sunlight and filling half the opposite sky and saw away above the pinewoods ascending beyond the little bridge the distant high white saddle of the pass with its twin peaks rising on either side—they startled her with their heightened beauty. These enchanted skaters, cooped upon their sunk enclosure had enlivened the surrounding scene not only by bringing forgetfulness of it, but because she knew the secret of their bliss, had shared long ago the experience that kept them confined here all day. Gliding, as if forever; the feeling, coming even with the first uncertain balance, of breaking through into an eternal way of being. In all games it was there, changing the aspect of life, making friends dearer, making even those actually disliked dear, as long as they were within the rhythm of the game. In dancing it was there. But most strongly that sense of being in an eternal way of living had come with skating in the foggy English frost. And this it must be that kept all these English eagerly and shamelessly fooling about on bladed feet; eternal life.