`I get awful
homesick for them, all the same,' she murmured, as if she were answering
some remembered reproach.
VI
WINTER COMES DOWN SAVAGELY over a little town on the prairie. The wind
that sweeps in from the open country strips away all the leafy screens that
hide one yard from another in summer, and the houses seem to draw closer
together. The roofs, that looked so far away across the green tree-tops,
now stare you in the face, and they are so much uglier than when their
angles were softened by vines and shrubs.
In the morning, when I was fighting my way to school against the wind, I
couldn't see anything but the road in front of me; but in the late
afternoon, when I was coming home, the town looked bleak and desolate to
me. The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify--it was
like the light of truth itself. When the smoky clouds hung low in the west
and the red sun went down behind them, leaving a pink flush on the snowy
roofs and the blue drifts, then the wind sprang up afresh, with a kind of
bitter song, as if it said: `This is reality, whether you like it or not.
All those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of
green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was
underneath.
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