The Girl from Sunset Ranch; Or, Alone in a Great CityMarlowe, Amy Bell
General
The Girl from Sunset Ranch; Or, Alone in a Great City
Marlowe, Amy Bell
Coming of age -- Juvenile fiction; Montana -- Juvenile fiction
Helen would have been glad to join one of the family groups. In one there
were two girls and a boy beside the parents and a lady who must have been
the governess. One of the girls, and the boy, were quite as old as Helen.
They were all so well behaved, and polite to each other, yet jolly and
companionable, that Helen knew she could have liked them immensely.
But there was nobody to introduce the lonely girl to them, nor to any
others of her fellow travelers. The conductor, even, did not take much
interest in the girl in brown.
She began to realize that what was the height of fashion in Elberon was
several seasons behind the style in larger communities. There was not a
pretty or attractive thing about Helen's dress; and even a very pretty
girl will seem a frump in an out-of-style and unbecoming frock.
It might have been better for the girl from Sunset Ranch if she had worn
on the train the very riding habit she had in her trunk. At least, it
would have become her and she would have felt natural in it.
She knew now--when she had seen the hats of her fellow passengers--that
her own was an atrocity. And, then, Helen had "put her hair up," which was
something she had not been used to doing. Without practice, or some
example to work by, how could this unsophisticated young girl have
produced a specimen of modern hair-dressing fit to be seen?
Even Dudley Stone could not have thought Helen Morrell pretty as she
looked now. And when she gazed in the glass herself, the girl from Sunset
Ranch was more than a little disgusted.
"I know I'm a fright. I've got 'such a muchness' of hair and it's so
sunburned, and all! What those girls I'm going to see will say to me, I
don't know. But if they're good-natured they'll soon show me how to handle
this mop--and of course I can buy any quantity of pretty frocks when I get
to New York."
So she only looked at the other people on the train and made no
acquaintances at all that first day. She slept soundly at night while the
Transcontinental raced on over the undulating plains on which the stars
shone so peacefully. Each roll of the drumming wheels was carrying her
nearer and nearer to that new world of which she knew so little, but from
which she hoped so much.
She dreamed that she had reached her goal--Uncle Starkweather's house.
Aunt Eunice met her. She had never even seen a photograph of her aunt; but
the lady who gathered her so closely into her arms and kissed her so
tenderly, looked just as Helen's own mother had looked.
She awoke crying, and hugging the tiny pillow which the Pullman Company
furnishes its patrons as a sample--the _real_ pillow never materializes.
But to the healthy girl from the wide reaches of the Montana range, the
berth was quite comfortable enough. She had slept on the open ground many
a night, rolled only in a blanket and without any pillow at all. So she
arose fresher than most of her fellow-passengers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
The Girl from Sunset Ranch; Or, Alone in a Great City — John Shaqi
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