There was the great city, bound more closely by these very trains which came up daily.

Columbia City was not so very far away, even once she was in Chicago.

What, pray, is a few hours--a few hundred miles?
She looked at the little slip bearing her sister's address and wondered.

She gazed at the green landscape, now passing in swift review, until her swifter thoughts replaced its impression with vague conjectures of what Chicago might be.
When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things.
Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.

Of an intermediate balance, under the circumstances, there is no possibility.
The city has its cunning wiles, no less than the infinitely smaller and more human tempter.