Theodore Dreiser

Sister Carrie

Warsaw 2022

Contents

The Magnet Attracting. A Waif Amid Forces

What Poverty Threatened. Of Granite and Brass

Wee Question of Fortune. Four-Fifty a Week

The Spendings of Fancy. Facts Answer with Sneers

A Glittering Night Flower. The Use of a Name

The Machine and the Maiden. A Knight of to-Day

The Lure of the Material. Beauty Speaks for Itself

Intimations by Winter. An Ambassador Summoned

Convention’s Own Tinder-Box. The Eye that is Green

The Counsel of Winter. Fortune’s Ambassador Calls

The Persuasion of Fashion. Feeling Guards O’er its Own

Of the Lamps of the Mansions. The Ambassador Plea

His Credentials Accepted. A Babel of Tongues

With Eyes and Not Seeing. One Influence Wanes

The Irk of the Old Ties. The Magic of Youth

A Witless Aladdin. The Gate to the World

A Glimpse Through the Gateway. Hope Lightens the Eye

Just Over the Border. A Hail and Farewell

An Hour in Elfland. A Clamour Half Heard

The Lure of the Spirit. The Flesh in Pursuit

The Lure of the Spirit. The Flesh in Pursuit

The Blaze of the Tinder. Flesh Wars with the Flesh

A Spirit in Travail. One Rung Put Behind

Ashes of Tinder. A Face at the Window

Ashes of Tinder. The Loosing of Stays

The Ambassador Fallen. A Search for the Gate

When Waters Engulf Us We Reach for a Star

A Pilgrim, an Outlaw. The Spirit Detained

The Solace of Travel. The Boats of the Sea

The Kingdom of Greatness. The Pilgrim a Dream

A Pet of Good Fortune. Broadway Flaunts its Joys

The Feast of Belshazzar. A Seer to Translate

Without the Walled City. The Slope of the Years

The Grind of the Millstones. A Sample of Chaff

The Passing of Effort. The Visage of Care

A Grim Retrogression. The Phantom of Chance

The Spirit Awakens. New Search for the Gate

In Elf Land Disporting. The Grim World Without

Of Lights and of Shadows. The Parting of Worlds

A Public Dissension. A Final Appeal

The Strike

A Touch of Spring. The Empty Shell

The World Turns Flatterer. An Eye in the Dark

And this is Not Elf Land. What Gold Will Not Buy

Curious Shifts of the Poor

Stirring Troubled Waters

The Way of the Beaten. A Harp in the Wind

Chapter I

The Magnet Attracting–A Waif Amid Forces

When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister’s address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money. It was in August, 1889. She was eighteen years of age, bright, timid, and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth. Whatever touch of regret at parting characterised her thoughts, it was certainly not for advantages now being given up. A gush of tears at her mother’s farewell kiss, a touch in her throat when the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father worked by the day, a pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in review, and the threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home were irretrievably broken.

To be sure there was always the next station, where one might descend and return. There was the great city, bound more closely by these very trains which came up daily. Columbia City was not so very far away, even once she was in Chicago. What, pray, is a few hours–a few hundred miles? She looked at the little slip bearing her sister’s address and wondered. She gazed at the green landscape, now passing in swift review, until her swifter thoughts replaced its impression with vague conjectures of what Chicago might be.

When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse. Of an intermediate balance, under the circumstances, there is no possibility. The city has its cunning wiles, no less than the infinitely smaller and more human tempter. There are large forces which allure with all the soulfulness of expression possible in the most cultured human. The gleam of a thousand lights is often as effective as the persuasive light in a wooing and fascinating eye. Half the undoing of the unsophisticated and natural mind is accomplished by forces wholly superhuman. A blare of sound, a roar of life, a vast array of human hives, appeal to the astonished senses in equivocal terms. Without a counsellor at hand to whisper cautious interpretations, what falsehoods may not these things breathe into the unguarded ear! Unrecognised for what they are, their beauty, like music, too often relaxes, then weakens, then perverts the simpler human perceptions.

Caroline, or Sister Carrie, as she had been half affectionately termed by the family, was possessed of a mind rudimentary in its power of observation and analysis. Self-interest with her was high, but not strong. It was, nevertheless, her guiding characteristic. Warm with the fancies of youth, pretty with the insipid prettiness of the formative period, possessed of a figure promising eventual shapeliness and an eye alight with certain native intelligence, she was a fair example of the middle American class–two generations removed from the emigrant. Books were beyond her interest–knowledge a sealed book. In the intuitive graces she was still crude. She could scarcely toss her head gracefully. Her hands were almost ineffectual. The feet, though small, were set flatly. And yet she was interested in her charms, quick to understand the keener pleasures of life, ambitious to gain in material things. A half-equipped little knight she was, venturing to reconnoitre the mysterious city and dreaming wild dreams of some vague, far-off supremacy, which should make it prey and subject–the proper penitent, grovelling at a woman’s slipper.

“That,” said a voice in her ear, “is one of the prettiest little resorts in Wisconsin.”

“Is it?” she answered nervously.

The train was just pulling out of Waukesha. For some time she had been conscious of a man behind. She felt him observing her mass of hair. He had been fidgetting, and with natural intuition she felt a certain interest growing in that quarter. Her maidenly reserve, and a certain sense of what was conventional under the circumstances, called her to forestall and deny this familiarity, but the daring and magnetism of the individual, born of past experiences and triumphs, prevailed. She answered.

He leaned forward to put his elbows upon the back of her seat and proceeded to make himself volubly agreeable.

“Yes, that is a great resort for Chicago people. The hotels are swell. You are not familiar with this part of the country, are you?”

“Oh, yes, I am,” answered Carrie. “That is, I live at Columbia City. I have never been through here, though.”

“And so this is your first visit to Chicago,” he observed.

All the time she was conscious of certain features out of the side of her eye. Flush, colourful cheeks, a light moustache, a grey fedora hat. She now turned and looked upon him in full, the instincts of self-protection and coquetry mingling confusedly in her brain.

“I didn’t say that,” she said.

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