The following day, dressed in a linen suit of natural colour, with the black bow at her throat, the new hat in a bandbox, and the renewed sailor on her head, Kate waved her farewells to Nancy Ellen and Robert on the platform, then walked straight to the dressing room of the car, and changed the hats.  Nancy Ellen had told her this was not the thing to do.  She should travel in a plain untrimmed hat, and when the dust and heat of her journey were past, she should bathe, put on fresh clothing, and wear such a fancy hat only with her best frocks, in the afternoon.  Kate need not have been told that.  Right instincts and Bates economy would have taught her the same thing, but she had a perverse streak in her nature.  She had seen herself in the hat.

The milliner, who knew enough of the world and human nature to know how to sell Kate the hat, when she never intended to buy it, and knew she should not in the way she did, had said that before fall it would bring her a carriage, which put into bald terms meant a rich husband.  Now Kate liked her school and she gave it her full attention; she had done, and still intended to keep on doing, first-class work in the future; but her school, or anything pertaining to it, was not worth mentioning beside Nancy Ellen’s home, and the deep understanding and strong feeling that showed so plainly between her and Robert Gray.  Kate expected to marry by the time she was twenty or soon after; all Bates girls had, most of them had married very well indeed.  She frankly envied Nancy Ellen, while it never occurred to her that any one would criticise her for saying so.  Only one thing could happen to her that would surpass what had come to her sister.  If only she could have a man like Robert Gray, and have him on a piece of land of their own.  Kate was a girl, but no man of the Bates tribe ever was more deeply bitten by the lust for land.  She was the true daughter of her father, in more than one way.  If that very expensive hat was going to produce the man why not let it begin to work from the very start?  If her man was somewhere, only waiting to see her, and the hat would help him to speedy recognition, why miss a change?

She thought over the year, and while she deplored the estrangement from home, she knew that if she had to go back to one year ago, giving up the present and what it had brought and promised to bring, for a reconciliation with her father, she would not voluntarily return to the old driving, nagging, overwork, and skimping, missing every real comfort of life to buy land, in which she never would have any part.

“You get your knocks ‘taking the wings of morning,’” thought Kate to herself, “but after all it is the only thing to do.  Nancy Ellen says Sally Whistler is pleasing Mother very well, why should I miss my chance and ruin my temper to stay at home and do the work done by a woman who can do nothing else?”

Kate moved her head slightly to feel if the big, beautiful hat that sat her braids so lightly was still there.  “Go to work, you beauty,” thought Kate.  “Do something better for me than George Holt.  I’ll have him to fall back on if I can’t do better; but I think I can.  Yes, I’m very sure I can!  If you do your part, you lovely plume, I know I can!”