Show 178 STUDENT LIFE Accustomed to the general broad atmosphere of good fellowship and simple informalities of the West she finds her well meant friendly advances met with a cold stare and haughty reserve She is snubbed repeatedly and treated as if she were some crude savage likely at any moment to go upon the warpath until she gradually draws about her a shell of reserve equal to that with which she has been met A great wave of lonesomeness overwhelms her — lonesomencss such as she has never known even when she found has herself after a on hard the out gallop great quiet range miles away from any human being with her pony for a companion She is homesick — utterly miser- ably homesick — try as sbe will to disguise this fact from her inner self She longs with an almost uncontrollable longing for the great rugged purple mountains out there in the West for one breath of the sweet pure mountain air untainted with the smoke of the city Just to feel again the open good fellowship of the westerners to get away from the mass of unfeeling humanity around her who seem to her like so much carved marble She longs feverishly for mutual human compaion-slii- p — the one moving force of the world — such as she left behind her in that other life Her dreams of a college career in which she was to figure so brightly are all rudely broken and it seems to her that she is the most insignificant friendless creature in the whole big city of cold selfish humanity At last comes a day when she can bear it no longer Bitter as is the thought that she must go home a miserable failure her college career ignominiously ended by homesickness she cannot endure the artificial restraints on her nature or longer resist her longing for home When she is once on the train speeding swiftly westward the awful lonesomeness of the last few weeks slips from her and she is again the d joyous full life of love and girl Arrived at home again she stretches out her arms to the big purple mountains that she loves so well and in their soothing shadows she finds a balm for the bitterness of her failure The charm of the West has not lost its power light-hearte- |