Quote File: Shadows on the Rock
‘Are you tired, Jacques?’
‘A little, my legs are,’ he admitted.
‘Get on the sled and I will pull you up. See there’s the evening star—how near it looks! Jacques, don’t you love winter?’
She put the sled-rope under her arms, gave her weight to it, and began to climb. A feeling came over her that there would never be anything better in the world for her than this; to be pulling Jacques on her sled, with the tender, burning sky before her, and on each side, in the dusk, the kindly lights from neighbours’ houses. If the Count should go back with the ships next summer, and her father with him, how could she bear it, she wondered. On a foreign shore, in a foreign city (yes, for her a foreign shore), would not her heart break for just this? For this rock and this winter, this feeling of being in one’s own place, for the soft content of pulling Jacques up Holy Family Hill into paler and paler levels of blue air, like a diver coming up from the deep sea.
—Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock
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