My Ántonia | Page 4

heat, and it was my good fortune to have for a traveling
companion James Quayle Burden--Jim Burden, as we still call him in
the West. He and I are old friends--we grew up together in the same
Nebraska town--and we had much to say to each other. While the train
flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns
and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we sat
in the observation car, where the woodwork was hot to the touch and
red dust lay deep over everything. The dust and heat, the burning wind,
reminded us of many things. We were talking about what it is like to
spend one's childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and
corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when
the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is
fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and
heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole
country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one

who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything
about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.
Although Jim Burden and I both live in New York, and are old friends,
I do not see much of him there. He is legal counsel for one of the great
Western railways, and is sometimes away from his New York office for
weeks together. That is one reason why we do not often meet. Another
is that I do not like his wife.
When Jim was still an obscure young lawyer, struggling to make his
way in New York, his career was suddenly advanced by a brilliant
marriage. Genevieve Whitney was the only daughter of a distinguished
man. Her marriage with young Burden was the subject of sharp
comment at the time. It was said she had been brutally jilted by her
cousin, Rutland Whitney, and that she married this unknown man from
the West out of bravado. She was a restless, headstrong girl, even then,
who liked to astonish her friends. Later, when I knew her, she was
always doing something unexpected. She gave one of her town houses
for a Suffrage headquarters, produced one of her own plays at the
Princess Theater, was arrested for picketing during a garment-makers'
strike, etc. I am never able to believe that she has much feeling for the
causes to which she lends her name and her fleeting interest. She is
handsome, energetic, executive, but to me she seems unimpressionable
and temperamentally incapable of enthusiasm. Her husband's quiet
tastes irritate her, I think, and she finds it worth while to play the
patroness to a group of young poets and painters of advanced ideas and
mediocre ability. She has her own fortune and lives her own life. For
some reason, she wishes to remain Mrs. James Burden.
As for Jim, no disappointments have been severe enough to chill his
naturally romantic and ardent disposition. This disposition, though it
often made him seem very funny when he was a boy, has been one of
the strongest elements in his success. He loves with a personal passion
the great country through which his railway runs and branches. His
faith in it and his knowledge of it have played an important part in its
development. He is always able to raise capital for new enterprises in
Wyoming or Montana, and has helped young men out there to do

remarkable things in mines and timber and oil. If a young man with an
idea can once get Jim Burden's attention, can manage to accompany
him when he goes off into the wilds hunting for lost parks or exploring
new canyons, then the money which means action is usually
forthcoming. Jim is still able to lose himself in those big Western
dreams. Though he is over forty now, he meets new people and new
enterprises with the impulsiveness by which his boyhood friends
remember him. He never seems to me to grow older. His fresh color
and sandy hair and quick-changing blue eyes are those of a young man,
and his sympathetic, solicitous interest in women is as youthful as it is
Western and American.
During that burning day when we were crossing Iowa, our talk kept
returning to a central figure, a Bohemian girl whom we had known
long ago and whom both of us admired. More than any other person we
remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions,
the whole adventure of our childhood. To speak her name was to call
up pictures of people and places, to set a quiet drama going in one's
brain. I had lost sight of her altogether, but Jim had