As far as the eye could reach, it was empty of all life, bare, mournful, absolutely still; and, as she looked, there seemed to her morbid imagination--diseased and disturbed with long brooding, sick with the monotony of repeated sensation--to be disengaged from all this immensity, a sense of a vast oppression, formless, disquieting.

The terror of sheer bigness grew slowly in her mind; loneliness beyond words gradually enveloped her.

She was lost in all these limitless reaches of space.

Had she been abandoned in mid-ocean, in an open boat, her terror could hardly have been greater.

She felt vividly that certain uncongeniality which, when all is said, forever remains between humanity and the earth which supports it.
She recognised the colossal indifference of nature, not hostile, even kindly and friendly, so long as the human ant-swarm was submissive, working with it, hurrying along at its side in the mysterious march of the centuries.