co-ordinate. There was nothing else in that world but these things, so
repellent of one another. He suffered from the incongruity of the wooden
bulk of the hotel, with the white drifts deep about it, and with the
granite cliffs of Lion's Head before it, where the gray crags darkened
under the pink afternoon light which was beginning to play upon its crest
from the early sunset. The wind that had seemed to bore through his thick
cap and his skull itself, and that had tossed the dry snow like dust
against his eyes on his way from the railroad, had now fallen, and an
incomparable quiet wrapped the solitude of the hills. A teasing sense of
the impossibility of the scene, as far as his art was concerned, filled
him full of a fond despair of rendering its feeling. He could give its
light and color and form in a sufficiently vivid suggestion of the fact,
but he could not make that pink flush seem to exhale, like a long breath,
upon those rugged shapes; he could not impart that sentiment of
delicately, almost of elegance, which he found in the wilderness, while
every detail of civilization physically distressed him. In one place the
snow had been dug down to the pine planking of the pathway round the
house; and the contact of this woodenness with the frozen ground pierced
his nerves and set his teeth on edge like a harsh noise. When once he saw
it he had to make an effort to take his eyes from it, and in a sort
unknown to him in summer he perceived the offence of the hotel itself
amid the pure and lonely beauty of the winter landscape. It was a note of
intolerable banality, of philistine pretence and vulgar convention, such
as Whitwell's low, unpainted cottage at the foot of the hill did not
give, nor the little red school-house, on the other hand, showing through
the naked trees. There should have been really no human habitation
visible except a wigwam in the shelter of the pines, here and there; and
when he saw Whitwell making his way up the hill-side road, Westover felt
that if there must be any human presence it should be some savage clad in
skins, instead of the philosopher in his rubber boots and his