And the
early bedtime and the early morning and the long, long day--what a
contrast to this!
I pressed my face against the window, but a rush of tears blurred all the
dear, familiar landmarks--Barzillai Foote's red barn, the grain elevator
at the siding, the Hartsville road trailing off over the prairie; I would
have given worlds to be in the top buggy again, moving homeward, instead
of going swiftly out, out, alone, into the world. Three months ago! I did
not dream what miracles were in store!
And so one day I reached the New York I had dreamed about. It wasn't as a
shrine of learning that it appealed to me, altogether; but as a wonderful
place, beautiful, glittering, feverish with motion, abounding with gayety,
thronged with people, bubbling with life.
How it fascinated me!
Just at first of course I was lonely because John had not yet come, and
Mrs. Baker, mother's cousin, was away from home. But I soon made friends
with my cousins, Ethel and Milly; shy, nice girls, twins and precisely
alike, except, that Ethel is slightly lame. And at my boarding place I
made the acquaintance of an art student from Cincinnati three or four
years older than I, who proposed that we should become girl bachelors and
live in a studio.
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