All else--the distant glamour of the city, of a life new and incomprehensible to her, full in the centre of the bustling world and no longer at its very confines--enticed her but the more in its shimmering remoteness with the mystery of a great light that shines from afar.
Whatsoever there may be of wonder and exhilaration in the sight and touch of the crowd; the rich harvests of mind and sense for which the city dweller has bartered his rough heritage of pride in the soil, Maria was dimly conscious of as part of this other life in a new world, this glorious re-birth for which she was already yearning.

But above all else the desire was strong upon her now to flee away, to escape.
The wind from the cast was driving before it a host of melancholy snow-laden clouds.

Threateningly they swept over white ground and sullen wood, and the earth seemed awaiting another fold of its winding-sheet; cypress, spruce and fir, close side by side and motionless, were passive in their attitude of uncomplaining endurance.

The stumps above the snow were like floating wreckage on a dreary sea.

In all the landscape there was naught that spoke of a spring to come--of warmth and growth; rather did it seem a shard of some disinherited planet under the eternal rule of deadly cold.
All of her life had Maria known this cold, this snow, the land's death-like sleep, these austere and frowning woods; now was she coming to view them with fear and hate.