Interiorly his heart had been sinking steadily during the
journey. He had mixed freely with the emigrants, and had done his
best to make friends; yet there was something not only in their
attitude to him--for though they were respectful enough, they
were absolutely impervious to any advances, seeming to regard him
as independent but rather timid children might look upon a
strange schoolmaster--but in their whole atmosphere and outlook
that was a very depressing change from the curious, impassive,
but alert and confident air to which he had grown accustomed
among the priests and people with whom he mixed. The one thing
that seemed to interest them was to discuss methods of government
and the internal politics of their future life in Massachusetts.
They asked a few questions about crops and soil; he even heard
one group in animated conversation on the subject of schools, but
the talk dropped as soon as he attempted to join in it. They all
talked English too, he noticed.

Yet though the atmosphere seemed to him very ungenial, it
appeared to him not altogether new; there appeared, somewhere in
the back of his mind, to be even an element of sympathy. He felt
almost like one who, having climbed out of a pit to the fresh
air, looks back at others who not only live in the pit, but are
content to live there.

For the world in which he had now consciously lived for the last
twelve months was, in spite of the sharp rigidity and certitude
and inexorable logic from which he shrank, undoubtedly a place of
large horizons. In fact it seemed as if there were no horizons.
On all sides there stretched out illimitable space, for eternity