It might have been better for the girl from Sunset Ranch if she had worn on the train the very riding habit she had in her trunk. At least, it would have become her and she would have felt natural in it.
She knew now—when she had seen the hats of her fellow passengers—that her own was an atrocity. And, then, Helen had “put her hair up,” which was something she had not been used to doing. Without practice, or some example to work by, how could this unsophisticated young girl have produced a specimen of modern hair-dressing fit to be seen?
Even Dudley Stone could not have thought Helen Morrell pretty as she looked now. And when she gazed in the glass herself, the girl from Sunset Ranch was more than a little disgusted.
“I know I’m a fright. I’ve got ‘such a muchness’ of hair and it’s so sunburned, and all! What those girls I’m going to see will say to me, I don’t know. But if they’re good-natured they’ll soon show me how to handle this mop—and of course I can buy any quantity of pretty frocks when I get to New York.”
So she only looked at the other people on the train and made no acquaintances at all that first day. She slept soundly at night while the Transcontinental raced on over the undulating plains on which the stars shone so peacefully. Each roll of the drumming wheels was carrying her nearer and nearer to that new world of which she knew so little, but from which she hoped so much.
She dreamed that she had reached her goal—Uncle Starkweather’s house. Aunt Eunice met her. She had never even seen a photograph of her aunt; but the lady who gathered her so closely into her arms and kissed her so tenderly, looked just as Helen’s own mother had looked.
She awoke crying, and hugging the tiny pillow which the Pullman Company furnishes its patrons as a sample—the real pillow never materializes.
But to the healthy girl from the wide reaches of the Montana range, the berth was quite comfortable enough. She had slept on the open ground many a night, rolled only in a blanket and without any pillow at all. So she arose fresher than most of her fellow-passengers.
One man—whom she had noticed the evening before—was adjusting a wig behind the curtain of his section. He looked when he was completely dressed rather a well-preserved person; and Helen was impressed with the thought that he must still feel young to wish to appear so juvenile.
Even with his wig adjusted—a very curly brown affair—the man looked, however, to be upward of sixty. There were many fine wrinkles about his eyes and deep lines graven in his cheeks.