Austin, sitting motionless beside her, found the night one of
purification and dedication. To men of Thomas's type, slow of wit, steady
and stolid and unemotional, the soil gives much of her own peaceful
wholesomeness. But those like Austin, with finer intellects, higher
ambitions, and stronger passions, often fare ill at her hands. Their
struggles towards education and the refinements of life are balked by
poverty and the utter fatigue which comes from overwork; while their
search for pleasure often ends in a knowledge and experience of vices so
crude and tawdry that men of greater wealth and more happy experience
would turn from them in disgust, not because they were more moral, but
because they could afford to be more fastidious. Between Broadway and the
"main street" of Wallacetown, and other places of its type--small
railroad or manufacturing centres, standing alone in an otherwise purely
agricultural community--the odds in favor of virtue, not to say decency,
are all in favor of Broadway; and Wallacetown, to the average youth of
Hamstead, represents the one opportunity for a "show," "something to
drink," and "life" in general.
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