thought of him as physically dead. For the moment death in relation to
her father did not take the form of a cold inanimate body that was to
be buried in the ground, instead it seemed to her that her father was
not to die but to go away somewhere on a journey. Long ago her mother
had done that. There was a strange hesitating sense of relief in the
thought. "Well," she told herself, "when the time comes I also shall be
setting out, I shall get out of here and into the world." On several
occasions Mary had gone to spend a day with her father in Chicago and
she was fascinated by the thought that soon she might be going there to
live. Before her mind's eye floated a vision of long streets filled
with thousands of people all strangers to herself. To go into such
streets and to live her life among strangers would be like coming out
of a waterless desert and into a cool forest carpeted with tender young
grass.

In Huntersburg she had always lived under a cloud and now she was
becoming a woman and the close stuffy atmosphere she had always
breathed was becoming constantly more and more oppressive. It was true
no direct question had ever been raised touching her own standing in
the community life, but she felt that a kind of prejudice against her
existed. While she was still a baby there had been a scandal involving
her father and mother. The town of Huntersburg had rocked with it and
when she was a child people had sometimes looked at her with mocking
sympathetic eyes. "Poor child! It's too bad," they said. Once, on a
cloudy summer evening when her father had driven off to the country and
she sat alone in the darkness by his office window, she heard a man and
woman in the street mention her name. The couple stumbled along in the
darkness on the sidewalk below the office window. "That daughter of Doc
Cochran's is a nice girl," said the man. The woman laughed. "She's
growing up and attracting men's attention now. Better keep your eyes in