But could I imitate them?
I thought of the house at home; of the old servants; how it runs on wheels; how pretty and--and dignified it all is; everybody at their post; no drudgery, no disorder." "It is a dignity that costs you dear," said Anderson almost roughly, and with a change of countenance.

"You sacrifice to it things a thousand times more real, more human." "Do we ?" said Elizabeth; and then, with a drop in her voice: "Dear, dear England!" She paused to take breath, and as she leant resting against a tree he saw her expression change, as though a struggle passed through her.
The trees had opened behind them, and they looked back over the lake, the hotel, and the wide Laggan valley beyond.

In all that valley, not a sign of human life, but the line of the railway.

Not a house, not a village to be seen; and at this distance the forest appeared continuous, till it died against the rock and snow of the higher peaks.
For the first time, Elizabeth was home-sick; for the first time she shrank from a raw, untamed land where the House of Life is only now rearing its walls and its roof-timbers, and all its warm furnishings, its ornaments and hangings are still to add.

She thought of the English landscapes, of the woods and uplands round her Cumberland home; of the old church, the embowered cottages, the lichened farms; the generations of lives that have died into the soil, like the summer leaves of the trees; of the ghosts to be felt in the air--ghosts of squire and labourer and farmer, alive still in men and women of the present, as they too will live in the unborn.