through never-ending
miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak
groves wilting in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the
woodwork was hot to the touch and red dust lay deep over everything. The
dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things. We were
talking about what it is like to spend one's childhood in little towns
like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of
climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a
brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and
smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little
snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We
agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could
know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.

Although Jim Burden and I both live in New York, and are old friends, I do
not see much of him there. He is legal counsel for one of the great
Western railways, and is sometimes away from his New York office for weeks
together. That is one reason why we do not often meet. Another is that I
do not like his wife.

When Jim was still an obscure young lawyer, struggling to make his way in
New York, his career was suddenly advanced by a brilliant marriage.
Genevieve Whitney was the only daughter of a distinguished man. Her
marriage with young Burden was the subject of sharp comment at the time.
It was said she had been brutally jilted by her cousin, Rutland Whitney,
and that she married this unknown man from the West out of bravado. She
was a restless, headstrong girl, even then, who liked to astonish her
friends. Later, when I knew her, she was always doing something
unexpected. She gave one of her town houses for a Suffrage headquarters,
produced one of her own plays at the Princess Theater, was arrested for
picketing during a garment-makers' strike, etc. I am never able to believe
that she has much feeling for the causes to which she lends her name and
her fleeting interest. She is handsome, energetic, executive, but to me
she seems unimpressionable and temperamentally incapable of enthusiasm.
Her husband's quiet tastes irritate her, I think, and she finds it worth
while to play the patroness to a group of young poets and painters of
advanced ideas and mediocre ability. She has her own fortune and lives her
own life. For some reason, she wishes to remain Mrs. James B