U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [110]
in Education. It took a lot of arguing because Dad had set his heart on having Daughter go to a finishing school but she final y convinced him and was off again to New York. She was reading Les Misérables al the way up on the train and looking out at the greyishbrownish winter land-scape that didn't seem to have any life to it after she left the broad hil s of Texas, pale green with winter wheat and alfalfa, feeling more and more excited and scared as hour by hour she got nearer New York. There was a stout
-261-motherly woman who'd lost her husband who got on the train at Little Rock and wouldn't stop talking about the dangers and pitfal s that beset a young woman's path in big cities. She kept such a strict watch on Daughter that she never got a chance to talk to the interesting looking young man with the intense black eyes who boarded the train at St. Louis and kept going over papers of some kind he had in a brown briefcase. She thought he looked a little like Joe Washburn. At last when they were crossing New Jersey and there got to be more and more factories and grimy industrial towns, Daughter's heart got to beating so fast she couldn't sit stil but kept having to go out and stamp around in the cold raw air of the vestibule. The fat greyheaded conductor asked her with a teasing laugh if her beau was going to be down at the station to meet her, she seemed so anxious to get in. They were going through Newark then. Only one more stop. The sky was lead color over wet streets ful of automobiles and a drizzly rain was pitting the patches of snow with grey. The train began to cross wide desolate saltmarshes, here and there broken by an uneven group of factory structures or a black river with steamboats on it. There didn't seem to be any people; it looked so cold over those marshes Daughter felt scared and lonely just looking at them and wished she was home. Then suddenly the train was in a tunnel, and the porter was piling al the bags in the front end of the car. She got into the fur coat Dad had bought her as a Christmas pres-ent and pul ed her gloves on over her hands cold with excitement for fear that maybe Ada Washburn hadn't got-ten her telegram or hadn't been able to come down to meet her. But there she was on the platform in noseglasses and raincoat looking as oldmaidish as ever and a slightly younger girl with her who turned out to be from Waco and studying art. They had a long ride in a taxi up crowded streets ful of slush with yel ow and grey snowpiles along
-262-the sidewalks. "If, you'd have been here a week ago, Anne Elizabeth, I declare you'd have seen a real blizzard."
"I used to think snow was like on Christmas cards," said Esther Wilson who was an interestinglooking girl with black eyes and a long face and a deep kind of tragicsounding voice. "But it was just an il usion like a lot of things."
" New York's no place for il usions," said Ada sharply. "It al looks kinder like a il usion to me," said Daughter, look-ing out of the window of the taxicab. Ada and Esther had a lovely big apartment on Univer-sity Heights where they had fixed up the dining room as a bedroom for Daughter. She didn't like New York but it was exciting; everything was grey and grimy and the people al seemed to be foreigners and nobody paid any attention to you except now and then a man tried to pick you up on the street or brushed up against you in the sub-way which was disgusting. She was signed up as a special student and went to lectures about Economics and English Literature and Art and talked a little occasional y with some boy who happened to be sitting next