Sister Carrie
Chapter One
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 w ... read full excerpt from Sister Carrie ebook
