Sister Carrie / Сестра Кэрри. Книга для чтения на английском языке

In was at that hour between afternoon and night when, for the idle, the wanderer, things are apt to take on a wistful aspect. The mind wanders forth on far journeys and returns with sheaves of withered and departed joys. Carrie sat at her window looking out.

While she was in this mood Drouet came in, bringing with him an entirely different atmosphere. It was dusk and Carrie had neglected to light the lamp. The fire in the grate, too, had burned low.

“Where are you, Cad?” he said, using a pet name he had given her.

“Here,” she answered.

There was something delicate and lonely in her voice, but he could not hear it. He had not the poetry in him that would seek a woman out under such circumstances and console her for the tragedy of life. Instead, he struck a match and lighted the gas.

“Hello,” he exclaimed, “you’ve been crying.”

Her eyes were still wet with a few vague tears. “Pshaw,” he said, “you don’t want to do that.”

He took her hand, feeling in his good-natured egotism that it was probably lack of his presence which had made her lonely.

“Come on, now,” he went on; “it’s all right. Let’s waltz a little to that music.”

He could not have introduced a more incongruous proposition. It made clear to Carrie that he could not sympathize with her. She could not have framed thoughts which would have expressed his defect or make clear the difference between them, but she felt it. It was his first great mistake.

What Drouet said about the girl’s grace, as she tripped out evening accompanied by her mother, caused Carrie to perceive the nature and value of those little moodish ways which women adopt when they would presume to be something.

She looked in the mirror and pursed up her lips, accomplishing it with a little toss of the head, as she had seen the railroad treasurer’s daughter do. She caught up her skirts with an easy swing, for had not Drouet remarked that in her and several others, and Carrie was naturally imitative. She began to get the hang of those little things which the pretty woman who has vanity invariably adopts. In shorts, her knowledge of grace doubled, and with it her appearance changed. She became a girl of considerable taste.

Drouet noticed this. He saw the new bow in her hair and the new way of arraying her locks which she affected one morning.

“You look fine that way, Cad,” he said.

“Do I?” she replied, sweetly.