As the train sped through the night Grace Durland decided that after all it didn’t matter so much!
She had parted tearfully from the girls at the sorority house and equally poignant had been the goodbyes to her friends among the faculty; but now that it was all over she was surprised and a little mystified that she had so quickly recovered from her disappointment. Bitterness had welled in her heart at the first reading of her mother’s letter calling her home. Her brother Roy, always the favored one, was to remain at the University to finish the law course, for which he had shown neither aptitude nor zeal, and this hurt a little. And they might have warned her of the impending crisis in the family fortunes before she left home to begin the fall term, only a month earlier.
But her resentment had passed. The spirit of adventure beat in her breast with strong insistent wing. With the fatalism of imaginative youth she was already assuring herself that some force beyond her control had caught her up and was bearing her on irresistibly.
She lay back at ease in her seat in the day coach, grateful that there were no acquaintances on the train to interrupt her reveries. She was twenty-one, tall, slightly above medium height and bore every mark of sound health and wholesome living—a fair representative of the self-reliant American girls visible on the campus of all Mid-Western colleges. The excitement of her hasty packing and leave-taking had left a glow in her olive cheeks. Her hair, where it showed under her sport hat, was lustrous black; her eyes were brown, though in shadow they changed to jade,—variable, interesting eyes they were, that arrested attention by their quick play of emotion. They expressed her alert intelligence, her frank curiosity, her sympathetic and responsive nature.
When the train reached Indianapolis she left her trunk check with the transfer agent and boarded a street-car. At Washington street, she transferred to the trolley line that ran down New York street, where the Durland home faced Military Park. New York street between the old canal and the western end of the park had once been a fashionable quarter of the town, and the old houses still stood though their glory of the Civil War time and the years immediately succeeding had departed. The Durlands lived in a big square brick house, set well back in a yard that rose a little above the street. The native forest trees in the lots all along the block added to the impression of age imparted by the houses themselves. Under the branches of the big walnut in the Durland front yard the neighborhood children of Grace’s generation had gathered to play. The tree was identified with her earliest recollections; it had symbolized the stability of the home itself.
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