The letter became somewhat more coherent as it progressed. Dade explained that they had come to Wiesbaden, not this time for her mother's health so much as for her own. Her physicians had advised it; she was run down, and as she was to be married in the fall, the baron wished her to be in good health. They might run over to America before the wedding; she wasn't sure; it would all depend. And they had not decided yet where they would be married, certainly, however, not in Grand Prairie--there would be no place there for the baron to stay. Emily finished the letter, and laid it in her lap with another sigh. She was all sighs this summer morning. And yet she could not, and would not, formulate to herself the reason why she sighed. She might with impunity have compared her own life with Dade's, for it was not the life that Dade was leading for which she sighed that summer. Once, perhaps, in looking from afar upon the society life of the cities as it was reflected in the newspapers, it had seemed to her that she might be happy there. She recalled having expressed something of this to a man from Chicago who had spent a day with her father. He was a lawyer, with a large practice, but one who nevertheless gave much of his fine talents to the poor, the forgotten, and the despised. For this he was called eccentric, sometimes crazy, often a socialist. She remembered him always as he sat in her father's library that evening after dinner--he had come down on some business relating to the bank, and had dined with her father. She remembered his strong face; a face wondrous in its sympathy, wondrous in its kindness, wondrous in its sadness. It seemed to reflect not only all the sorrow he had seen, but all the sorrow he had perceived in his deep, penetrating knowledge of life. She always pictured him as he sat in the library that evening. She had expressed, in her girlish way, something of her wish for a larger life, by which she then meant life in a larger place, and never could she forget the lift of his gentle eyes, or the smile that came to his weary visage as he said: "Grand Prairie is as big as Chicago, and a country cross-roads as big as either."