For the moment she was tender with regrets. "After
all, Jim Priest and my father must be a good deal alike," she thought.
"They have lived on the same farm, eaten the same food; they both love
horses. There can't be any great difference between them." All night she
thought of the matter. An obsession, that the whole world was aboard the
moving train and that, as it ran swiftly along, it was carrying the people
of the world into some strange maze of misunderstanding, took possession
of her. So strong was it that it affected her deeply buried unconscious
self and made her terribly afraid. It seemed to her that the walls of the
sleeping-car berth were like the walls of a prison that had shut her away
from the beauty of life. The walls seemed to close in upon her. The walls,
like life itself, were shutting in upon her youth and her youthful desire
to reach a hand out of the beauty in herself to the buried beauty in
others. She sat up in the berth and forced down a desire in herself to
break the car window and leap out of the swiftly moving train into the
quiet night bathed with moonlight. With girlish generosity she took upon
her own shoulders the responsibility for the misunderstanding that had
grown up between herself and her father. Later she lost the impulse that
led her to come to that decision, but during that night it persisted. It
was, in spite of the terror caused by the hallucination regarding the
moving walls of the berth that seemed about to crush her and that came back
time after time, the most beautiful night she had ever lived through, and
it remained in her memory throughout her life.
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