She had taken a last survey of her dismantled home, given the last directions to the old Chinese servant left in charge, presided haggardly at the last home breakfast----what a ghastly little ceremony it was! Then Mr. Valentin had gone across the Oakland ferry with them and put them aboard the train, muffled up as for winter. They had looked into each other's pale faces and parted for two years, all for Elsie's sake. But what Elsie thought about it--whether she understood or cared for what this sacrifice of home and treasure was to purchase--it was impossible to learn. Still more what her father thought. What he had always said was, "You had better go." "But do you truly think it _is_ the best thing for the child?" "I think that, whatever we do, there will be times when we'll wish we had done something different; and there will be other times when we shall be glad we did not. All we can do is the best we know up to date." "But do you think it is the best?" "I think, Emmy, that you will never be satisfied until you have tried it, and it's worth the money to me to have you feel that you have done your best." Mrs. Valentin sighed. "Sometimes I wonder why we do cling to that old fetich of the East. Why can't we accept the fact that we are Western people? The question is, Shall we be the self-satisfied kind or the unsatisfied kind? Shall we be contented and limited, or discontented and grow?" "I guess we shall be limited enough, either way," Mr. Valentin retorted easily. He had no hankering for the East and no grudge against fate for making him a Western man _malgré lui_. "I've known kickers who didn't appear to grow much, except to grow cranky," he said. Up to the moment of actual departure, Mrs. Valentin had continued to review her decision and to agonize over its possibilities of disaster; but now that the journey had begun, she was experiencing the rest of change and movement. She was as responsive as a child to fresh outward impressions, and the hyperbolical imagination that caused her such torture when it wrought in the dark hours on the teased fabric of her own life, could give her compensating pleasures by daylight, on the open roads of the world. There was as yet nothing outside the car windows which they had not known of old,--the marsh-meadows of the Lower Sacramento, tide-rivers reflecting the sky, cattle and wild fowl, with an occasional windmill or a duck-hunter's lodge breaking the long sweeps of low-toned color. The morning sun was drinking up the fog, the temperature in the Pullman steadily rising. Jackets were coming off and shirt-waists blooming out in summer colors, giving the car a homelike appearance. It was a saying that summer, "By their belts ye shall know them." Shirt-waists no longer counted, since the ready-made ones for two dollars and a half were almost as chic as the tailor-made for ten. But the belts, the real belts, were inimitable. Sir Lancelot might have used them for his bridle--