and warmth which usually follows such toil, as it must to the birds who have built their nest, she found with consternation that it was not there—the feeling of intimacy, of home, was not there. She changed the petates, she moved the pictures, she hung orchids at the windows, arranged a panoply of native hats and spears over the door, fringed the grass-cloth portières. But it was useless. The feeling would not come. And she realised that it would never come; that all these efforts were puerilities before the great crushing assertion of the land—the grass-dishevelled plaza, the ruined church, glistening in the white sun, the palms, the steaming mountain, the brown populations; that before this tranquil, brooding, all-powerful Presence, all her little defenses of art and adornment shrivelled, dried into dust as cardboard toys in a furnace. It was like hiding behind leaves from God.
She turned to her work with an enfevered zeal. She found a tumble-down nipa shed where some twenty half-naked, half-starved, miserable little beings, herded every morning by the municipal police, gathered beneath the stick of a slovenly, dull-eyed man, with a gibberish of English—the native teacher appointed temporarily by the military government. The school supplies had not come yet; there were no charts, no books, no slates, no paper, no pencils. The
