Sublime

there was something about this country when it was a wild old beast that has haunted me all these years.

for all its pastoral

They were beckoning mountains with a brown grass love.

She had felt the joy of love for that so far from ordinary man—a conductor on the railroad but also a poet, a journalist—and her fragile mind had been unable to readjust to the rough normality of life without him.

This young misfortune was not unlike a shrub, newly planted in an uncongenial soil, where its leaves have already begun to wither.

For his evening reading he stuffed into his briefcase a narrative by an old hunter in the Southwest who had fought Apaches.

She was good in the fullest and narrowest sense of the word as it is applied to female children. And she had blossomed into exactly the sort of adult her childhood predicted. Ah well.

“If you’re ever in Cody, Wyoming,” said Billy Pilgrim behind his white linen screens, “just ask for Wild Bob.”

She knew Ernie lived nearby with his wife and four sons. The passage of time, and the details that spun some moments into unforgettable memories and others into thin air, traveled with Sylvie—the swirling atmosphere of her own life—