e pugholes flutter choirs of
crimson-winged blackbirds; that the ugly brown birds squatting on
fence-rails were the divine-voiced meadow larks; that among the humble
cowbird citizens of the pastures sometimes flaunted a scarlet tanager or
an oriole; and that no rose garden has the quaint and hardy beauty of
the Indian paint brushes and rag babies and orange milkweed in the
prickly, burnt-over grass between roadside and railway line.

She had learned that what had seemed rudeness in garage men and hotel
clerks was often a resentful reflection of her own Eastern attitude
that she was necessarily superior to a race she had been trained to call
"common people." If she spoke up frankly, they made her one of their
own, and gave her companionable aid.

For two days of sunshine and drying mud she followed a road flung
straight across flat wheatlands, then curving among low hills. Often
there were no fences; she was so intimately in among the grain that the
fenders of the car brushed wheat stalks, and she became no stranger, but
a part of all this vast-horizoned land. She forgot that she was driving,
as she let the car creep on, while she was transported by Armadas of
clouds, prairie clouds, wisps of vapor like a ribbed beach, or mounts of
cumulus swelling to gold-washed snowy peaks.

The friendliness of the bearing earth gave her a calm that took no heed
of passing hours. Even her father, the abstracted man of affairs, nodded
to dusty people along the road; to a jolly old man whose bulk rolled and
shook in a tiny, rhythmically creaking buggy, to women in the small
abrupt towns with their huge red elevators and their long, flat-roofed
stores.

Claire had discovered America, and she felt stronger, and all her days
were colored with the sun.

She had discovered, too, that she could adventure. No longer was she
haunted by the apprehension that had whispered to her as she had left
Minneapolis. She knew a thrill when she hailed--as though it were a
passing ship--an Illinois car across whose dust-caked back was a banner
"Chicago to the Yellowstone." She experienced a new sensation of common
humanness when, on a railway paralleling the wagon road for miles, the
engineer of a freight waved his hand to her, and tooted the whistle in
greeting.

Her father was easily tired, but he drowsed through the early afternoons
when a none-too-digestible small-town lunch was as lead within him.
Despite the beauty of the land and the joy of pus