Sister Carrie: Chapters 26–36

Sunday passed with equal doubts, worries, assurances, and heaven knows what vagaries of mind and spirit.

Before retiring, however, she sat down to think, and gave herself up to the most gloomy forebodings.

“I don’t know,” he answered, looking her brazenly over. “Have you ever had any experience upon the stage?”

She felt as if the thing deserved an answer, and consequently decided that she would write and let him know that she knew of his married state and was justly incensed at his deception.

At her room, the wording of this missive occupied her for some time, for she fell to the task at once.

He was slightly depressed at the tenor of the note for the first few minutes, but soon recovered. “She wouldn’t write at all if she didn’t care for me.”

As he did so, he made up his mind that if Carrie was alone, or if she had gone to another place, it behooved him to find out.

He was too proud to toady, too keen not to strictly observe the plane he occupied when there were those present who did not appreciate him, but, in situations like the present, where he could shine as a gentleman and be received without equivocation as a friend and equal among men of known ability, he was most delighted.

If he ever approached intoxication—or rather that ruddy warmth and comfortableness which precedes the more sloven state—it was when individuals such as these were gathered about him, when he was one of a circle of chatting celebrities.

Stories began to crop up—those ever-enduring, droll stories which form the major portion of the conversation among American men under such circumstances.

It was quite a superfluous action, which another time might not have happened at all.

The manager was no fool to be led blindly away by such an errant proposition as this, but his situation was peculiar.

We must remember that it may not be a knowledge of right, for no knowledge of right is predicated of the animal’s instinctive recoil at evil.

Carrie said nothing, and the horse gambolled on.

She was nonplussed at the possibility of the errand being different from what she had thought.

He only looked at her in the most kindly and mollifying way.

“Won’t you let me get you a berth in the sleeper?”

He did not want to be a thief. That sum or any other could never compensate for the state which he had thus foolishly doffed. It could not give him back his host of friends, his name, his house and family, nor Carrie, as he had meant to have her.

There is a world of accumulated feeling back of the trite dramatic expression—“I am going away.”

He began to trouble concerning the extradition laws. He did not understand them absolutely. Perhaps he could be arrested.

So long, also, will the atmosphere of this realm work its desperate results in the soul of man. It is like a chemical reagent. One day of it, like one drop of the other, will so affect and discolour the views, the aims, the desire of the mind, that it will thereafter remain forever dyed.

Elegant back rooms and private drinking booths on the second floor were usually adjuncts of very profitable places.

He carried himself with the same self-important air, took his new state with easy familiarity, and rejoiced in Carrie’s proclivities and successes.

She noticed suddenly that Mrs. Vance’s manner had rather stiffened under the gaze of handsome men and elegantly dressed ladies, whose glances were not modified by any rules of propriety. To stare seemed the proper and natural thing.

Coachmen in tan boots, white tights, and blue jackets waited obsequiously for the mistresses of carriages who were shopping inside.

For Carrie, as we well know, the stage had a great attraction. She had never forgotten her one histrionic achievement in Chicago.

A little food in the stomach does wonders. She went again, and in so doing temporarily recovered her equanimity.

The latter caught in a glance the dimensions of a very stalwart figure. She also noticed that he was smooth-shaven, good looking, and young, but nothing more.

Carrie followed up this desultory conversation with occasional interruptions from the Vances.

They entered the lobby already swarming with patrons, and then, after divesting themselves of their wraps, went into a sumptuous dining-room.

Either he is growing stronger, healthier, wiser, as the youth approaching manhood, or he is growing weaker, older, less incisive mentally, as the man approaching old age.

Frequently there is a period between the cessation of youthful accretion and the setting in, in the case of the middle-aged man, of the tendency toward decay when the two processes are almost perfectly balanced and there is little doing in either direction.

The poisons generated by remorse inveigh against the system, and eventually produce marked physical deterioration.

It is the unintellectual miser who sweats blood at the loss of a hundred dollars. It is the Epictetus who smiles when the last vestige of physical welfare is removed.

“I’ll look around,” said Carrie, observing that the proposed change seemed to be a serious thing with him. The upshot of this was that the change was eventually effected; not without great gloom on the part of Carrie.

After taking off his coat, he felt it incumbent upon him to make some little report of his day.

The Italian newsdealer now delivered the morning papers, and these he read assiduously.

“He may not now,” answered Hurstwood, doggedly, well understanding the inference; “but his life isn’t done yet. You can’t tell what’ll happen. He may get down like anybody else.”

There was a better hand across the table, held by a pugnacious Irish youth, who was a political hanger-on of the Tammany district in which they were located.

Hurstwood was surprised at the persistence of this individual, whose bets came with a sang-froid which, if a bluff, was excellent art.