The Project Gutenberg EBook of Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dreiser

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Title: Sister Carrie

Author: Theodore Dreiser

Posting Date: July 10, 2008 [EBook #233]
Release Date: March, 1995

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SISTER CARRIE ***

Produced by John Hamm

SISTER CARRIE

by Theodore Dreiser

Chapter I. THE MAGNET ATTRACTING--A WAIF AMID FORCES

When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total
outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin
satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow leather snap purse,
containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister's address in Van
Buren Street, and four dollars in money. It was in August, 1889. She
was eighteen years of age, bright, timid, and full of the illusions of
ignorance and youth. Whatever touch of regret at parting characterised
her thoughts, it was certainly not for advantages now being given up. A
gush of tears at her mother's farewell kiss, a touch in her throat when
the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father worked by the day,
a pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in
review, and the threads 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 the great city, bound more closely by these very
trains which came up daily. Columbia City was not so very far away,
even once she was in Chicago. What, pray, is a few hours--a few hundred
miles? She looked 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 vague
conjectures of what Chicago might be.

When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things.
Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly
assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse. Of an
intermediate balance, under the circumstances, there is no possibility.
The city has its cunning wiles, no less than the infinitely smaller and
more