her one journey to Chicago. Of course it had been possible for any of them to spend an extra dollar for a seat in a parlor car; but no one of them had thought of doing it. What a contempt had David Herrick for people who paid to put themselves apart from others or who cared so much for the comfort of a cotton cover over plush that they spent extra fare for it! Yet, here was David Herrick escorting his wife aboard the parlor car for Itanaca.
It did no good for him to argue with himself that, considering what he was making, he "ought" to take a parlor car; his own feelings answered him, as he sat in his separate seat with its clean, white cover over the plush, with the window beside him screened against dust, with an electric fan whirling noiselessly above him—and in the next seat a girl so beautiful that every one gazed at her in admiration and who was his wife. He was a different person from the boy who used to travel, to and from college, in those hot, grimy, common coaches ahead.
The train, leaving the city and the region of the lake, passed into the country, into the familiar, flat, cloudless cornland of central Illinois. Over the fields, black and brown and gray and all studded with the bright green leaves and stalks of the growing corn, lay a glaring, heavy heat. No breeze stirred the solidity of it. Motorcars cut it, cleaving in straight lines on the level, yellow roads and the dust, raised by their wheels, remained suspended in long streaks which showed the substance of that hot sunlight; the cars which stood at the crossing, waiting for the train to go by, were halted under hanging, powdery halos of haze.
