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“Oh!” said the girl, covering her face with her hands. “Oh! Oh!” For a moment she felt that she could not bear it, but as she heard the man laugh she made her own discomfiture comic and gave an extra groan or two that were purely theatrical. She raised her head and looked at him shamefaced, and the…

She giggled like a soubrette. The giggle was quite out of character at the moment, but she had not been able to resist it.

Actually, she decided, it was the combination of provincialism and adventurousness that did the trick. This man was the frontier, though the American frontier had closed, she knew, forever, somewhere out in Oregon in her father’s day. Her father, when that door had shut, had remained on the inside.…

The girl bit her lips. The man’s vulgarity was undeniable. For some time now she had been attempting (for her own sake) to whitewash him, but the crude raw material would shine through in spite of her. It had been possible for her to remain so long in the compartment only on the basis of one of two…

“You people are crazy, though,” he said genially. “You’re never going to get anywhere in America with that proletariat stuff. Every workingman wants to live the way I do. He doesn’t want me to live the way he does. You people go at it from the wrong end. I remember a Socialist organizer came down f…