etended to believe that everybody
travelled this way, and that Mart was merely doing the ordinary in the
matter of meals and state-room; and as he wandered from end to end of
the train and found only luxurious coaches, and people taking their
ease, he had all the best of the argument. Lucius he regarded as a man
of his own level, and they held long confabulations together--the
colored man accepting this comradeship in the spirit of democracy in
which it was given. Mart, for his part, sat looking out of the window,
dreaming of the past.

As she neared Chicago next day Bertha thought with pleasure of seeing
the Mosses again. Now that Humiston was eliminated, she had only the
pleasantest memories of the people she had met in the smoky city. It was
as if in a dark forest of lofty trees she had found a pleasant mead on
which the warm sunlight fell. The mellow charm of the studios was made
all the more appealing by reason of the drab and desolate waste through
which she was forced to pass to attain the light and laughter of those
high places.

Chicago had grown more gloomily impressive, and at the same time--by
reason of her knowledge of the larger plans and mightier enterprises of
New York--it seemed simpler, and Bertha re-entered the hotel which had
once dazzled her in confidence, finding it cheerful and familiar. She
liked it all the better because it was less pretentious. It gave her a
pleasant sense of getting back home to have the men in buttons smile and
say, "Glad to see you, Mrs. Haney." The head clerk was very cordial; he
even found time to come out and shake hands. "I can't give you precisely
your old quarters," he said, "but I can fix you out on the next floor.
I'm sure you'll be very comfortable." Thereupon she took up her quietly
luxurious life at the point where she had dropped it some weeks before.

There lay in this Western girl a strongly marked tendency towards the
culture and refinement of the East; and, though she had grown up far
from anything aesthetic in home-life, she instinctively knew and loved
the beautiful in nature, the right thing in art; and now that she was
about to leave the East for the West--perhaps to abandon the town for
the village--she found herself aching with a hunger which had hitherto
been unconscious. She was torn with desire to go and a longing to stay.
New York, Paris, the world, was open before her if only she were content
to take Marshall Haney's money and use it to these end