Sister Carrie | Page 3

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Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser



Chapter I
THE MAGNET ATTRACTING--A WAIF AMID FORCES
When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her
total outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin
satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow leather snap purse,
containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister's address in Van
Buren Street, and four dollars in money. It was in August, 1889. She
was eighteen years of age, bright, timid, and full of the illusions of
ignorance and youth. Whatever touch of regret at parting characterised
her thoughts, it was certainly not for advantages now being given up. A
gush of tears at her mother's farewell kiss, a touch in her throat when
the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father worked by the day, a
pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in
review, and the threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and
home were irretrievably broken.
To be sure there was always the next station, where one might descend
and return. There was the great city, bound more closely by these very
trains which came up daily. Columbia City was not so very far away,
even once she was in Chicago. What, pray, is a few hours--a few
hundred miles? She looked at the little slip bearing her sister's address

and wondered. She gazed at the green landscape, now passing in swift
review, until her swifter thoughts replaced its impression with vague
conjectures of what Chicago might be.
When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things.
Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly
assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse. Of an
intermediate balance, under the circumstances, there is no possibility.
The city has its cunning wiles, no less than the infinitely smaller and
more human tempter. There are large forces which allure with all the
soulfulness of expression possible in the most cultured human. The
gleam of a thousand lights is often as effective as the persuasive light in
a wooing and fascinating eye. Half the undoing of the unsophisticated
and natural mind is accomplished by forces wholly superhuman. A
blare of sound, a roar of life, a vast array of human hives, appeal to the
astonished senses in equivocal terms. Without a counsellor at hand to
whisper cautious interpretations, what falsehoods may not these things
breathe into the unguarded ear! Unrecognised for what they are, their
beauty, like music, too often relaxes, then weakens, then perverts the
simpler human perceptions.
Caroline, or Sister Carrie, as she had been half affectionately termed by
the family, was possessed of a mind rudimentary in its power of
observation and analysis. Self-interest with her was high, but not strong.
It was, nevertheless, her guiding characteristic. Warm with the fancies
of youth, pretty with the insipid prettiness of the formative period,
possessed of a figure promising eventual shapeliness and an eye alight
with certain native intelligence, she was a fair example of the middle
American class--two generations removed from the emigrant. Books
were beyond her interest--knowledge a sealed book. In the intuitive
graces she was still crude. She could scarcely toss her head gracefully.
Her hands were almost ineffectual. The feet, though small, were set
flatly. And yet she was interested in her charms, quick to understand
the keener pleasures of life, ambitious to gain in material things. A
half-equipped little knight she was, venturing to reconnoitre the
mysterious city and dreaming wild dreams of some vague, far-off
supremacy, which should make it prey and subject--the proper penitent,

grovelling at a woman's slipper.
"That," said a voice in her ear, "is one of the prettiest little resorts in
Wisconsin."
"Is it?" she answered nervously.
The train was just pulling out of Waukesha. For some