"Yes," the elder Mr. Roberts explained to me, "and there's another John O. Roberts, too—my grandson. We're all John O. Robertses in this family. We perpetuate the name because it's an honest name. No John O. Roberts ever went to the penitentiary—or to the legislature."
CHAPTER XXII
KANSAS CITY
If you will take a map of the United States and fold it so that the Atlantic and Pacific coast lines overlap, the crease at the center will form a line which runs down through the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas. That is not, however, the true dividing line between East and West. If I were to try to draw the true line, I should begin at the north, bringing my pencil down between the cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis, leaving the former to the east, and the latter to the west, and I should follow down through the middle of Minnesota, Iowa, and Missouri, so that St. Louis would be included on the eastern map and Kansas City and Omaha on the western.
My companion and I had long looked forward to the West, and had speculated as to where we should first meet it. And sometimes, as we traveled on, we doubted that there really was a West at all, and feared that the whole country had become monotonously "standardized," as was recently charged by a correspondent of the London "Times."
I remember that we discussed that question on the train, leaving St. Louis, wondering whether Kansas City, whither we were bound, would prove to be but one more city like the rest—a place with skyscrapers and shops and people resembling, almost exactly, the skyscrapers and shops and people of a dozen other cities we had seen.
Morning in the sleeping car found us less concerned about the character of cities than about our coffee. Coffee was not to be had upon the train. In cheerless emptiness we sat and waited for the station.