Page:The Baron of Diamond Tail (1923).pdf/74

 "You've got reason enough for hating it," he said, startled not so much by her revelation as her dramatic way of making it. "I never heard of that tragedy."

"No, it was only an everyday incident, a pebble dropped into this big bowl where we're immersed. A little news like that doesn't make noise enough to sound out of this country."

"I didn't suppose the immensity of it, the vast emptiness like the sea, would be felt by a person born to it," he speculated, a mental picture forming of the dead man lying face to the sky, dust of retreating horsemen on the horizon.

"It's echoless," said she, her searching eyes set on its distances; "there's nothing to hurl back remorse for a cruel deed upon the guilty one. It goes out from a man like the passing wind, and troubles him no more. It's a land without an echo to strike back on the conscience and the heart."

"That makes sinning easy," he said, understanding her. "But why shouldn't it make a good man better, hold him up to himself, I mean, and steady him with a new nobility?"

"It does seem to work out that way now and then, but not often. Mainly its—its—mere boundlessness"—lifting her hands to support the impotency of her words—"enlarges the passions of men. Their appetites become grosser, their hates, their lusts, their wild, mad loves. All is intensified in them here out of proportion with the rest of the world. Passions seem to enlarge in men to fill the immensity of this thing without conscious boundary, this cruel thing that makes