The lovely rolling Kentucky land began to spread out on all sides. Long white curves of the pike flowed slowly behind us and were seen in glimpses through the open front windows ahead of us. Dust rose and settled over us.
A little while before we got to Latonia, the old horse-radish woman, with a tin cup she carried, knocked on the ceiling of the 'bus near the driver’s peep-hole, to warn him that she wished to get out. When we arrived at Latonia and the horses were having water at the big trough, the old man with the basket of eggs also left.
But I was going all the way to the county seat and I considered these passengers much below my own level as travelers. They were merely making a convenience of the 'bus, you see, which just happened to go past their homes; whereas I was off for adventure, my home quite in the other direction, and the world spread wide before me.
It was with a tourist’s pleasure, then, that I looked at that little grouping of houses and the elm-and poplar-shaded pike, which in those days was called, and I believe is still called, Latonia; and at the old Latonia Springs Hotel. It was a typical relic of Southern before-the-war hotel architecture, with its white pillars, its long verandas, its wide doorway, its large lawn sombred by very old shade trees.
I had known something of travel. I had lived in France for two years, at school; but there I had always had some one to go about with me. Here, on the contrary, I was alone. I liked the flavor of the adventure; it was novel, and very stimulating. This journey, however poor a thing it might seem to others, had Audrey’s superlative virtue: it was mine own. The old hotel, then, already romantic enough, took on an additional romance in my eyes.
The driver came around now from sponging his horses' heads and noses at the trough.
'Going all the way, are you?'
I nodded.
'Well, you can get out and stretch your legs if you like, for we’ll be here ten minutes.'
But I did not 'like.' In the 'bus I felt safe enough; but if I got out—adventurous spirit though I was—I knew with unconquerable shyness that everybody would be staring at me.