He had been furious with his mother for suggesting that one of the Tracys should meet him at the station in New York, and had sworn that he would never again let his family treat him like a "softy"; but when Upton's wistful face appeared in the heedless indifferent throng on the platform, Vance felt the relief of a frightened child that has lost its way. "Comes of being sick," he grumbled to himself as his cousin pointed to the red carnation which was to identify him. Vance, who, at Euphoria, would have condescended to the shy boy at his side, now felt still shyer himself, and was grateful to Upton for having so little to say, and for assuming as a matter of course that they were just to wait in the station till the next train left for Paul's Landing. Luckily it left in half an hour.

His mother had said: "You just let me know if you see anything over there that's so much better than Euphoria," and he had smiled and made no answer. But the request came back to him with a shock of something like humiliation when he and Upton stepped out of the station at Paul's Landing. There was the usual bunch of Fords waiting there, and next to them, under the pale green shade of some crooked-boughed locust trees, a queer-looking group of old carts and carryalls, with drooping horses swishing off the flies and mournfully shaking their heads. The scene was like something in a film of the Civil War, one of those films that were full of horses with swishing tails and draggly manes. One of the horses, the oldest and mournfullest looking, with a discoloured white mane like a smoker's beard, was tied to a chewed-off post; Upton went up and unhitched him, and the horse shook his head in melancholy recognition.

"We're a good way from the trolley, so one of the neighbours lent me his team to come and get you," Upton explained, lifting Vance's luggage into the back of a buggy which seemed at least coeval with the horse. Vance could not have walked a step at that moment, much less carried the smallest of his two bags, so he was grateful to the unknown neighbour; but when he remembered how, if you went to stay with a chum at Swedenborg or Dakin, or anywhere in his home state, you buzzed away from the station in a neat Ford (if it wasn't in a stylish Chevrolet or the family Buick), a sense of dejection was added to his profound fatigue. His mother had said: "You wait and see—" and he was seeing.