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Теодор Драйзер

Sister Carrie / Сестра Кэрри. Книга для чтения на английском языке

© Антология, 2016

© КАРО, 2016

Chapter I

The Magnet Attracting: A Wife amid Forces

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 girls 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.

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.

“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 fidgeting, 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 experience 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.