mother sat up very straight and stiff in the seat in the sleeping car
and her father walked up and down in the aisle. After a night when the
younger of the two women did not sleep but lay awake with red burning
cheeks and with her thin fingers incessantly picking at the bed clothes
in her berth while the train went through towns and cities, crawled up
the sides of hills and fell down into forest-clad valleys, she got up
and dressed to sit all day looking at a new kind of land. The train ran
for a day and through another sleepless night in a flat land where
every field was as large as a farm in her own country. Towns appeared
and disappeared in a continual procession. The whole land was so unlike
anything she had ever known that she began to feel unlike herself. In
the valley where she had been born and where she had lived all her days
everything had an air of finality. Nothing could be changed. The tiny
fields were chained to the earth. They were fixed in their places and
surrounded by aged stone walls. The fields like the mountains that
looked down at them were as unchangeable as the passing days. She had a
feeling they had always been so, would always be so.

Elsie sat like her mother, upright in the car seat and with a back like
the back of a drill sergeant. The train ran swiftly along through Ohio
and Indiana. Her thin hands like her mother's hands were crossed and
locked. One passing casually through the car might have thought both
women prisoners handcuffed and bound to their seats. Night came on and
she again got into her berth. Again she lay awake and her thin cheeks
became flushed, but she thought new thoughts. Her hands were no longer
gripped together and she did not pick at the bed clothes. Twice during
the night she stretched herself and yawned, a thing she had never in
her life done before. The train stopped at a town on the prairies, and
as there was something the matter with one of the wheels of the car in
which she lay the trainsmen came with flaming torches to tinker it.