Page:Weeds (1923).pdf/126

 in such a hurry to git married. There's times when I wish I was back home with dad agin. It wa'n't like that in the books we used to read. You 'member them books?"

Lizzie May named several novels by such purveyors of roseate fiction as Bertha M. Clay, Mary Jane Holmes and Laura Jean Libbey, which in ragged paper covers had found their way into the Pippinger home.

"Yes, but in them books it allus ends when they git married," Judith reminded her. "They never tell what happens after. All they say is that they lived happy ever after."

"Yes, an' they're allus about rich people," chimed in Lizzie May. "I did used to love to read them books an' fancy I lived like that. I guess rich husbands is dif'rent. It must be awful nice to be rich."

She sighed and her blue eyes looked wistfully out of the window, where white clouds could be seen chased by the March wind across a bright blue sky.

The shriek of a whistle pierced the air, and a train half a mile away roared along the track on its way to Lexington. Through the little window the smoke from the engine could be seen in a white, moving column.

"Wouldn't it be nice if we was all rich an' ridin' away through the country on that big train!" she sighed. "When you're poor an' stuck allus in the same place, life gits to seem so dull."

In Lizzie May's imagination only the rich and happy rode on trains. She figured riding in a train as a sumptuous and palatial progress toward some idyllic pleasure goal. The reality of smoke, cinders, stale air, germ-infested plush, and filthy floor, tired women and dirty children, staid spinsters, and sleek commercial travelers with fat necks, dingy people hastening anxiously to deathbeds or drearily to new jobs: all this was happily unknown to her. Her eyes followed the white moving column of smoke hungrily, wistfully.

"Yes, it must be awful nice to be rich," she sighed again, as the column of smoke disappeared.

"Yes, I s'pose it is nice to be rich," rejoined Judith, with