Mrs. Weston looked at him witheringly. “What you know of Lucilla Tracy is exactly nothing, Lorin; and you say that only because you remember she was pretty, and had on a showy pink dress with ruffles.” But Mr. Weston, unperturbed, said, well, he didn’t know as those were such bad points in a woman; and anyhow he’d go along to the telegraph office and wire, and then they’d see. He guessed they’d be pretty well able to judge by the answer.
At the Grand Central Station, a week later, Vance was met by his young cousin, Upton Tracy. Upton was a spindly boy of about sixteen, with wistful gray eyes and a pleasant smile. He told Vance he had a job with a nurseryman at Paul’s Landing, but the manager had let him off for the afternoon so that he could come to New York to meet his cousin.
Vance hoped that Upton would not see how glad he was to be met. He was still weak after his illness, and the long railway journey—the first of that length that he had ever taken—had exhausted him more than he had expected. When he got into the train at Chicago his heart was beating so excitedly at the idea of seeing New York that he had nearly forgotten all his disgusts and disillusionments, and had secretly made up his mind to stop over for a night in the metropolis before going on to join his relatives at Paul’s Landing. But now, in his tired state, and oppressed as he was by the sense of inferiority produced by untired conditions and surroundings, he felt unequal to coping with this huge towering wilderness of masonry where Vance Weston of Euphoria was of no more account to anyone among the thousands inhabiting it than a single raindrop to the ocean.
He had been furious with his mother for suggesting that one of the Tracys should meet him at the station in New York, and had sworn that he would never again let his family treat him like a “softy”; but when Upton’s wistful face appeared in the heedless indifferent throng on the platform, Vance felt the relief of a frightened child that has lost its way. “Comes of being sick,” he grumbled to himself as his cousin pointed to the red carnation which was to identify him. Vance, who, at Euphoria, would have condescended to the shy boy at his side, now felt still shyer himself, and was grateful to Upton for having so little to say, and for assuming as a matter of course that they were just to wait in the station till the next train left for Paul’s Landing. Luckily it left in half an hour.
His mother had said: “You just let me know if you see anything over there that’s so much better than Euphoria,” and he had smiled and made no answer. But the request came back to him with a shock of something like humiliation when he and Upton stepped out of the station at Paul’s Landing. There was the usual bunch of Fords waiting there, and next to them, under the pale green shade of some crooked-boughed locust trees, a queer-looking group of old carts and carryalls, with drooping horses swishing off the flies and mournfully shaking their heads. The scene was like something in a film of the Civil War, one of those films that were full of horses with swishing tails and draggly manes. One of the horses, the oldest and mournfullest looking, with a discoloured white mane like a smoker’s beard, was tied to a chewed-off post; Upton went up and unhitched him, and the horse shook his head in melancholy recognition.
“We’re a good way from the trolley, so one of the neighbours lent me his team to come and get you,” Upton explained, lifting Vance’s luggage into the back of a buggy which seemed at least coeval with the horse. Vance could not have walked a step at that moment, much less carried the smallest of his two bags, so he was grateful to the unknown neighbour; but when he remembered how, if you went to stay with a chum at Swedenborg or Dakin, or anywhere in his home state, you buzzed away from the station in a neat Ford (if it wasn’t in a stylish Chevrolet or the family Buick), a sense of dejection was added to his profound fatigue. His mother had said: “You wait and see—” and he was seeing.
The old horse jogged them through Paul’s Landing, a long crooked sort of town on a high ridge, with gardens full of big trees, and turfy banks sloping down from rambling shabby-looking houses. Now and then a narrower street dipped downhill to their left, and Vance caught a glimpse of lustrous gray waters spreading lakelike to distant hills. “The Hudson,” Upton said, flicking his stump of a whip; and at the moment the name stirred Vance more than the sight of the outspread waters. They drove on down a long street between shops, garages, business buildings, all more or less paintless and dilapidated, with sagging awnings lowered against the premature spring heat; then uphill along a rutty lane between trees and small frame houses even shabbier than the others, though some had pretty flowers before them, and lilacs and syringas blooming more richly than Grandma Scrimser’s.
“This is it,” said Upton, in a voice still shyer and more apologetic. “It” was a small wooden house, painted dark brown, with the paint peeling off, and a broken-down trellis arbour in a corner of the front yard. There were shade trees over the house, and a straggling rose on the verandah; but the impression made by the whole place was of something neglected and dingy, something left in a backwater, like the sad Delaney house from which Vance still