Sister Carrie

SISTER CARRIE
My Dear Mr. Norris:
Owing as I do so very much to your earliest and most unqualified approval of this story in manuscript form it is my determination to inscribe a copy to you whether you will or no. That it reaches either you or the public under cover so soon is due entirely to you. Therefore refuse not a corner on the family table to the off-spring you so generously fostered; neither attempt to deny in the future that your sins do find you out.
With the most grateful remembrances I am,
Sincerely yours Dreiser
By Theodore Dreiser
NEW YORK Doubleday, Page & Co. 1900
COPYRIGHT, 1900, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO.
TO MY FRIEND ARTHUR HENRY WHOSE STEADFAST IDEALS AND SERENE DEVOTION TO TRUTH AND BEAUTY HAVE SERVED TO LIGHTEN THE METHOD AND STRENGTHEN THE PURPOSE OF THIS VOLUME.

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.