To these people the wind comes from
the wide unending spaces of the prairie West. They can smell the
strange thrilling odor of newly uncovered sod and moist brown
plowed lands. To them it is like the opening door of a prison.
Robert had crawled downtown and up to his office high in the Star
block after a month's sickness. He had resolutely pulled a pad of
paper under his hand to write, but the window was open and that
wind coming in, and he could not write-he could only dream.
His brown hair fell over the thin white hand which propped his
head. His face was like ivory with dull yellowish stains in it. His
eyes did not see the mountainous roofs humped and piled into vast
masses of brick and stone, crossed and riven by streets, and swept
by masses of gray-white vapor; they saw a little valley circled by
low-wooded bluffs-his native town in Wisconsin.
As his weakness grew his ambition fell away, and his heart turned
back to nature and to the things he had known in his youth, to the
kindly people of the olden time. It did not occur to him that the
spirit of the country might have changed.
Sitting thus, he had a mighty longing come upon him to give up
the struggle, to go back to the simplest life with his wife and two
boys.
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