Youth, however, has its recuperative powers.  The next day the excitement of the journey held her, the sight of new cities and a new countryside.  But when she tried to eat the lunch Aunt Mary had so carefully put up, new memories assailed her, and she went with Mrs. Stanley into the dining car.  The September dusk was made lurid by belching steel-furnaces that reddened the heavens; and later, when she went to bed, sharp air and towering contours told her of the mountains.  Mountains which her great-grandfather had crossed on horse back, with that very family silver in his saddle-bags which shone on Aunt Mary’s table.  And then—­she awoke with the light shining in her face, and barely had time to dress before the conductor was calling out “Jersey City.”

Once more the morning, and with it new and wonderful sensations that dispelled her sorrows; the ferry, the olive-green river rolling in the morning sun, alive with dodging, hurrying craft, each bent upon its destination with an energy, relentlessness, and selfishness of purpose that fascinated Honora.  Each, with its shrill, protesting whistle, seemed to say:  “My business is the most important.  Make way for me.”  And yet, through them all, towering, stately, imperturbable, a great ocean steamer glided slowly towards the bay, by very might and majesty holding her way serene and undisturbed, on a nobler errand.  Honora thrilled as she gazed, as though at last her dream were coming true, and she felt within her the pulse of the world’s artery.  That irksome sense of spectatorship seemed to fly, and she was part and parcel now of the great, moving things, with sure pinions with which to soar.  Standing rapt upon the forward deck of the ferry, she saw herself, not an atom, but one whose going and coming was a thing of consequence.  It seemed but a simple step to the deck of that steamer when she, too, would be travelling to the other side of the world, and the journey one of the small incidents of life.

The ferry bumped into its slip, the windlasses sang loudly as they took up the chains, the gates folded back, and Honora was forced with the crowd along the bridge-like passage to the right.  Suddenly she saw Cousin Eleanor and the girls awaiting her.

“Honora,” said Edith, when the greetings were over and they were all four in the carriage, which was making its way slowly across the dirty and irregularly paved open space to a narrow street that opened between two saloons, “Honora, you don’t mean to say that Anne Rory made that street dress?  Mother, I believe it’s better-looking than the one I got at Bremer’s.”

“It’s very simple,”, said Honora.

“And she looks fairly radiant,” cried Edith, seizing her cousin’s hand.  “It’s quite wonderful, Honora; nobody would ever guess that you were from the West, and that you had spent the whole summer in St. Louis.”