1900

                                 SISTER CARRIE

                              by Theodore Dreiser

                        Chapter I.

         THE MAGNET ATTRACTING: A WAIF AMID FORCES

  When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her
total outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap imitation
alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow
leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her
sister's address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money. It
was in August, 1889. She was eighteen years of age, bright, timid, and
full of the illusions of ignorance and youth. Whatever touch of regret
at parting characterised her thoughts, it was certainly not for
advantages now being given up. A gush of tears at her mother's
farewell kiss, a touch in her throat when the cars clacked by the
flour mill where her father worked by the day, a pathetic sigh as
the familiar green environs of the village passed in review, and the
threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home were
irretrievably broken.

  To be sure there was always the next station, where one might
descend and return. There was the great city, bound more closely by
these very trains which came up daily. Columbia City was not so very
far away, even once she was in Chicago. What, pray, is a few hours-
a few hundred miles? She looked at the little slip bearing her
sister's address and wondered. She gazed at the green landscape, now
passing in swift review, until her swifter thoughts replaced its
impression with vague conjectures of what Chicago might be.

  When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things.
Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she
rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.
Of an intermediate balance, under the circumstances, there is no
possibility. The city has its cunning wiles, no less than the
infinitely smaller and more human tempter. There are large forces
which allure with all the soulfulness of expression possible in the
most cultured human. The gleam of a thousand lights is often as
effective as the persuasive light in a wooing and fascinating eye.
Half the undoing of the unsophisticated and natural mind is
accomplished by forces wholly superhuman. A blare of sound, a roar
of life, a vast array of human hives, appeal to the astonished
senses in equivocal terms. Without a counsellor at hand to whisper
cautious interpretations, what falsehoods may not these things breathe
into the unguarded ear! Unrecognised for what they are, their
beauty, like music, too often relaxes, then weakens, then perverts the
simpler human perceptions.

  Caroline, or Sister Carrie, as she had been half affectionately
termed by the family, was possessed of a mind rudimentary in its power
of observation and analysis. Self-interest with her was high, but
not strong. It was, nevertheless, her guiding characteristic. Warm
with the fancies of youth, pretty with the insipid prettiness of the
formative period, possessed of a figure promising eventual shapeliness
and an eye alight with certain native intelligence, she was a fair
example of the middle American class- two generations removed from the
emigrant. Books were beyond her interest- knowledge a sealed book.
In the intuitive graces she was still crude. She could scarcely toss
her head gracefully. Her hands were almost ineffectual. The feet,
though small, were set flatly. And yet she was interested in her
charms, quick to understand the keener pleasures of life, ambitious to
gain in material things. A half-equipped little knight she was,
venturing to reconnoitre the mysterious city and dreaming wild
dreams of some vague, far-off supremacy, which should make it prey and
subject- the proper penitent, grovelling at a woman's slipper.

  "That," said a voice in her ear, "is one of the prettiest little
resorts in Wisconsin."

  "Is it?" she answered nervously.

  The train was just pulling out of Waukesha. For some time she had
been conscious of a man behind. She felt him observing her mass of
hair. He had been fidgetting, and with natural intuition she felt a
certain interest growing in that quarter. Her maidenly reserve, and
a certain sense of what was conventional under the circumstances,
called her to forestall and deny this familiarity, but the daring
and magnetism of the individual, born of past experiences and
triumphs, prevailed. She answered.

  He leaned forward to put his elbows upon the back of her seat and
proceeded to make himself volubly agreeable.

  "Yes, that is a great resort for Chicago people. The hotels are
swell. You are not familiar with this part of the country, are you?"

  "Oh, yes, I am," answered Carrie. "That is, I live at Columbia City.
I have never been through here, though."

  "And so this is your first visit to Chicago," he observed.

  All the time she was conscious of certain features out of the side
of her eye. Flush, colourful cheeks, a light moustache, a grey
fedora hat. She now turned and looked upon him in full, the
instincts of self-protection and coquetry mingling confusedly in her
brain.