The Travelling Thirds by Gertrude Atherton

He did not haunt her dreams, however, and she had quite forgotten him as she watched the sunrise next morning from the long ridge of the Montjuich. Her cabman was refreshing himself elsewhere and she had given herself up to one of the keenest delights known to the imaginative and ungregarious mind, the solitary contemplation of nature. She watched the great, dusky plains and the jagged whiteness of Montseny's lofty crest turn yellow. Spain is one of those rare, dry countries where the very air changes color. The whole valley seemed to fill slowly with a golden mist, the snow on the great peak and on the Pyrenees beyond glittered like the fabled sands, and even the villas clinging to the steep mountain-side, the palaces in their groves of palm-trees and citron, orange, and pomegranate, all seemed to move and sway as in the depths of shimmering tides.

Catalina had the gift to see color in atmosphere as apart from the radiance that falls on sky and mountain, a gift which is said to belong only to people so highly civilized as to be on the point of degeneration. Catalina, with her robust youth and brain, was well on the hither side of degeneration, but in her lonely life and dislike of humankind she had cultivated her natural appreciation of beauty until it had not only developed her perceptions to acuteness but empowered them, when enchanted, to rise high above the ego.