Theodore Dreiser

Sister Carrie Theodore Dreiser

When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of asmall trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow leathersnap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister's address in Van Buren Street, andfour dollars in money. It was in August, 1889. She was eighteen years of age, bright, timid, and fullof the illusions of ignorance and youth. Whatever touch of regret at parting characterised herthoughts, it was certainly not for advantages now being given up. A gush of tears at her mother'sfarewell kiss, a touch in her throat when the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father workedby the day, a pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in review, and thethreads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home were irretrievably broken. To be sure there was always the next station, where one might descend and return. There was thegreat city, bound more closely by these very trains which came up daily. Columbia City was not sovery far away, even once she was in Chicago. What, pray, is a few hours-a few hundred miles? Shelooked at the little slip bearing her sister's address and wondered. She gazed at the green landscape, now passing in swift review, until her swifter thoughts replaced its impression with vagueconjectures of what Chicago might be