The following day they sped through a land whose kind he knew, but after another night he awoke to find their train breasting the brown waves of a sea that rolled lazily to far horizons. No longer was there one of his beloved mountain peaks to be a landmark: only an endless, curving lowness, as of land that had once tried to lash itself into the fury of mountain and crag, and then ceased all effort—to lie forever impotent and sad.
He thought of Ben amid this disconsolate welter. Ben had beheld this sight years ago, and had described it with aversion, as one relating a topographical scandal. Ewing favored his companion with heartfelt dispraise of this landscape, applauding the suggestion of a woman she laughingly quoted that "there should be a tuck taken in the continent." He was sure nothing would be lost by it.
The lady beguiled him over the inadequacies of Kansas by promising a better land farther on. He gladly turned from the car window to watch the pretty play of her mouth as she talked.
But the next day—they steamed out of St. Louis in the morning—he scanned several hundred square miles of excellent farming land with sheer dismay. From morning till night they ran through what, to Ewing, was a dead, depressing flatness, a vast and clumsy jest of a checkerboard, with cornfields for squares. The tiny groves of oak at long intervals seemed only to satirize the monotony. The rolling plains of the day before had been vivacious beside this flatness, and there had been a certain mournful dignity in their solitude. But this endless level lacked even solitude. To Ewing, indeed, the mystery of it lay in its well-peopled towns. He wondered how men kept sane there. Mrs. Laithe insisted that it was an important stretch of our country, that it fed thousands and made useful objects in its tall-chimneyed factories (things like wagons and watches and boots, she believed), and that it ought not to be discountenanced. But he could feel nothing for it, save an unconfessed pity that it would sleep that night in ignorance of his glorious transit. He had never suspected there could be so many thousands of people who took the world as a tame affair and slept indifferent to young men with great things before them.
"If New York is like this," he said, with a flash of his old boyish excitement, "what can I ever do without you?"
"But it isn't at all like this, and you'll do big things without me—or with me, if I can help you."
"You will have to help me. Now that I've seen the beginning of the world, I'm depending on you more than I thought I should when we started."
"You will lose that."
"Will I? But it will be queer to see you as part of the world—no longer the whole of it; to see how you stand out from the others. Perhaps the rest of the world will be only a dingy background for you—you are all color and life."
"You've made me feel like a lay figure," she laughed. Then, in a flash of womanish curiosity, she ventured, "Have you ever thought me anything but a shell of color?"