Die Wirkung eines solchen Hauses auf seinen Besitzer ist unverkennbar. […] Es ist ein gegenseitiger Austausch von Würde, Bedeutung und Kraft, und jeg… - Theodore Dreiser

"Every person according to his light," said Ames "You must help the world express itself. Use will make your powers endure..."

When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for Chicago, her total outfit consisted of a small trunk, a cheap imitation alligator-skin satchel, a small lunch in a paper box, and a yellow leather snap purse, containing her ticket, a scrap of paper with her sister's address in Van Buren Street, and four dollars in money. It was in August, 1889. She was eighteen years of age, bright, timid, and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth. Whatever touch of regret at parting characterised her thoughts, it was certainly not for advantages now being given up. A gush of tears at her mother's farewell kiss, a touch in her throat when the cars clacked by the flour mill where her father worked by the day, a pathetic sigh as the familiar green environs of the village passed in review, and the threads which bound her so lightly to girlhood and home were irretrievably broken.

for he could feel their eager eyes and their eager words as clearly as he could hear their scratching pens. And all for the papers — his blanching face and trembling hands — they would have that down — and his mother in Denver and everybody else there in Lycurgus would see and read — how he had looked at the Aldens and they had looked at him and then he had looked away again.