It is over!
The world in which she has been living floats away like evanescent smoke in ether-filled space. She awakens to the unfriendly glare of the foot-lights, the restless, garish crowd, the unfeeling world again.
Ugh! She shudders. If she could never more waken. Whence comes this pain, this actual pain which racks her?
Even that is over at last, and she can arise and escape from it all. How gladly she would shut herself up in her own little room with Dolores again. But it must not be. The five dollars a night for these exhibitions must be earned and laid by for Dolores.
She puts on her wraps and enters her carriage to be whirled away to the hotel, her temporary abiding place. What are her thoughts and reflections upon this lonely, homeward ride!
“O God, O God!� she is saying; “show me some other way! Am I wrong, wicked to do this? Where does it come from, this power? From Thee or from the shades of darkness? If I only knew! If I only knew! Why did it ever come to me? Why should my life be so differently ordered from that of other and happier women? Can it be I am the same who was once safe and sheltered in the comforts of home? Safe? Did not the serpent enter my Eden—even there?
“O God! why did it come? Can this life be real? If I could but waken and find it all a dream.�
CHAPTER XV
WELCOME GUESTS
We will pass over the first few years of Lissa’s pioneer life, only mentioning one or two experiences which, though common to that section of the country, brought terror and anxiety to the heart of our little bright-eyed woman. Again they experienced the sweeping of a prairie fire near them, when Nathan came expecting to find their home in ashes, and another hour when a blizzard drove them terrorstricken to their dug-out, where, during the long night, they listened to the shrieking and pounding of the elements, expecting every moment to have the roof torn from the house.
There had been seasons of famine and distress, too, when neighbors had been obliged to turn to each other for aid, and the higher and diviner attributes of mankind had shone forth as gold from the crucible, and others, alas! had been proven so encased in the rock of selfishness that when Famine’s gaunt wolf howled about they thought only of themselves and their own safety, and consoled their consciences by quoting, “Charity begins at home.�