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?" He stammered, blushing painfully. "Oh, a real person--of course, certainly! A woman, yes--but when I think of you as a woman, I'm scared, like those first times I saw you. I can't help it. You may not believe it," he concluded with a burst of candor, "but the truth is, I don't know women." He was again embarrassed when she retorted, with her laugh: "O youth! May you always know so much!" "Well, to-morrow afternoon we shall be in New York," he said briskly, when she had shut the deeps of her eyes from him. He had felt the need to show that there were matters upon which he could speak with understanding. CHAPTER IX A DINNER AT SEVEN-THIRTY