Ada was in ecstasy. Just by going down the Pike, pulling an amused Charles Raven behind her, she was transported to Rome, Jerusalem, Paris, the Tyrolean Alps, Siberia, an Eskimo village, Japan, and a floating trip through the whole Creation. Her world was limitless now, just as she had known it would be if only she could get to the St. Louis World's Fair. The Pike was to the 1904 St. Louis Fair what the Midway had been to the 1893 Chicago World's Fair—the entertainment sector of the exposition. This was worth everything she had done to get here, even though she had to admit that she had enjoyed what she had done. That was all part of the greater world she wanted to grasp. It was the twentieth century and she wanted to be a twentieth-century woman.
Charles hadn't been able to fully understand this. He had understood only that she wanted to get to the St. Louis Fair and that she was willing to lay with him, to let him make love to her, to get there. But Ada fully realized that the fair was only a symbol. It was a symbol of all she wanted out of life. It represented sophistication and wonder and the greater world. And Ada wanted all of that. She wasn't selling herself to get it. She was opening herself to new pleasures and understandings. And she was doing so on her own terms. On her own terms, no matter what a conniving Hiram, or a sour-dispositioned father, or a pursed-lipped Aunt Martha, or a crestfallen William Hagen, or even, yes, even an amused Charles Raven thought.
But she loved how Charles Raven made love to her too. He was teaching her so much, giving her so much pleasure. Their first night in St. Louis he had shown how she could heat and melt to him even without him forcing that thing deep inside her and wiggling it about and stroking it in and out. That had brought her pleasure, certainly. But that first night in St. Louis, when he had sat her on the bed and pushed her back onto the satin spread and held her wrists in his hands and used his tongue and only his tongue to bring her to flow and a shooting off of electricity within her, she had reached heights of pleasure and fulfillment that she had never imagined possible.
And then he had taught her how she could excite him with her tongue and lips as well, how she could make that thing of his, what he called his cock, expand and throb and then enter her and make her groan with pleasure pain and moan all over again. She had had no idea. She had had no idea what wonders there were. It all made Natoma, Kansas, and her father's sterile world look all the more dreary.
Ada did fleetingly wonder why Charles seemed to be pressing to teach her the ways of love in such depth so quickly. It gave her the sense that he was fleeting himself. She did surmise briefly, but only briefly, that he may be so taken with her that he couldn't help himself. But the realist inside her told her that Charles was only really totally taken with himself.
Only when Charles had suggested that they might just stay in the hotel room and make love and learn new aspects of making love forever did Ada snap out of her new, opulent world. No, she had come here for the fair. They must go to the fair.
And here she was in the very center of the Pike, gazing in fascination at the Magic Whirlpool and its sixty-foot circular waterfall. And looking to the top of that, she saw in the near distance the 265-foot Ferris wheel that had been brought here from the Chicago fair of 1893. They simply must go on that. She must be on the top of the world. But she was on the top of the world already without the Ferris wheel. And they said there would be a full-scale naval battle at two that afternoon they could not miss and there would be snowfall at the ice skating rink after that even now in the dead of summer, and then they must try that ice cream in a cone she'd heard about, and . . .
It was hours before Charles was able to bring Ada back to earth and get through to her that he wasn't there only for pleasure—that he was here to work—and that, since she was here with him, she wasn't here fully for her own pleasure either nor could she expect him to spend every moment they weren't making love here at the attractions of the Pike.
And even then it took some time for his entire meaning to sink in. They were eating lunch beside a make-believe Venetian canal and he was telling her that they'd have to put in an appearance soon at the Palace of Varied Industries outside of the Pike, where his boss and benefactor, the Chicago department store mogul George Vaughn, was snapping up orders for the household appliances of the future that no one would understand how they existed without ten years from now. And Charles also wanted her to meet his younger brother, John, who was temporarily working for Vaughn's close friend, the automobile manufacturer James Shaffer, who had an exhibit at the Palace of Transportation.
Charles was sitting at the café table stroking Ada's forearm and sending chills of pleasure through her when he carefully moved into talking about just how far what she could be doing to aid his work here at the fair extended.
"You are actually particularly blessed that you will be meeting Vaughn and Shaffer," he was saying. "They are tremendously powerful men."
"Umm, yes, and you are a tremendously powerful man," Ada said, as she brushed her hand unobtrusively over Charles's groin under the table.
He winced and pressed on. "No, I mean, you say you want the whole world, that you want to live large and broadly. These men can do that for you, Ada. And in the process you could be helping me tremendously."