Three days later, Seth departed for the city. It was not a particularly impressive ceremony, this leave-taking, not half so much as he had imagined it would be.
He had risen early, dressed himself in one of the two new, ready-made, cheap suits Albert had bought for him at Thessaly and packed all his possessions in the carpet satchel which had been in the family he knew not how long—and still found, when he descended the stairs, that he was the first down. It was a dark, rainy morning, and the living room looked unspeakably desolate, and felt disagreeably cold. He sat for a long time by a window pondering the last copy of John’s Banner, and trying to thus prepare his mind for that immense ordeal of daily newspaper work, that struggle of unknown, titanic proportions, now close before him.
Alvira at last came in to lay the breakfast table.
“Hello, you up already?” was all she said; but he felt she was eyeing him furtively, as if even thus soon he was a stranger in the house of his birth.
Aunt Sabrina next appeared. “There! I knew it ’d rain,” she exclaimed. “I told Alviry so last night. When th’ cords on th’ curtains git limp, yeh can’t fool me ’baout it’s not rainin’. ’N’ Seth, I hope you’ll go to Church regular whatever else you dew. ’N’ ef yeh could take a class in th’ Sunday schewl, it’d go a long ways tow’rd keepin’ yeh aout o’ temptation. Will yeh go to th’ Baptist Church, think? Th’ Fairchilds ’v’ allus be’n Baptists.”
The breakfast passed in constrained silence, save for Albert, who delivered a monologue on the evils of city life, and the political and ethical debauchery of the press, to which Seth tried dutifully to pay attention—thinking all the while how to say goodbye to Isabel, how to invest his words with a fervor the others would not suspect.
When the time came, all this planning proved of no avail. He found himself shaking hands as perfunctorily with her as with her husband, and his father and aunt. Only the latter kissed him, and she did it with awkward formality.
Then he climbed into the buggy where Milton and the carpet bag were already installed, and, answering in kind a chorus of “Good-byes” drove out into the rain—and the World.