His love of the sands and the purple buttes of the plain did not blind him to the beauty of coloring and the gracious majesty of these peaks, clothed as they were with the russet and gold and amber of ripened grasses, which grew even to the very summits (only the kingliest of the peaks were permitted to wear the ermine robes which denoted sovereignty); the Continental Divide was, indeed, much more impressive than he had expected it to be.
He was not one of those who seek out strange women, and he had no hope of meeting the girl of the mountain-side again. He was content to have her remain a poem--a song of the sunset--a picture seen only for a moment, yet whose impression outlasts iron. Everything in nature had converged to make her momentous. His long stay among the ugly, dusky women of the desert, his exultant joy in the mountain sunset, and his abounding health (which filled his heart with the buoyancy of a boy)--all these causes combined to revive emotions which his absorption in scientific investigation had set in the background--emotions which concern the common man, but which the deeply ambitious chemist, eager to discover the chemical molecular structure of the plasm, must put aside with a firm hand.