Ada was standing at the door of the school house, watching the children filing out and trying her best not to burst into tears. Watching the children file out. The children.
Returning to her life in Slater, Missouri, had been easy enough. All thanks to Aunt Martha. Her aunt hadn't been nearly as judgmental about Ada's fling with Charles Raven at the World's Fair as Ada thought she'd be. Her lips, indeed, had been pursued and her arms folded tightly across her chest when Ada arrived at her home. But there was a twinkle in her eye as well and she melted to Ada's florid description of the fair and of nearly everything that had happened there. Nearly everything. But Martha was no dummy. She had discerned much of what Ada hadn't said—at least where it concerned Charles Raven. There was a glow about Ada that could only have one explanation.
Martha had been young once herself—and hadn't held back herself a time or two. Ada's hurried departure from Slater had provided Martha the opportunity to explain away her absence by saying that Ada's father in Natoma, Kansas, had taken ill suddenly and the dutiful daughter had flown directly to his side until the crisis had, thank the Lord, passed. The explanation was so simple and so much in keeping of the disposition Ada showed to the world that even the hopeful emporium proprietor William Hagen had believed the story, completing understanding now why Ada had just disappeared from this store that day along with his old friend Charles Raven. Ada had, of course, received the news about her father that very day, while William was briefly in the storeroom, and she had rushed out to run to his side. And Charles had gone with her to smooth her journey.
Life had gone back to normal for Ada—or almost to normal. She had a job she enjoyed, an aunt who she could trust and confide in far more than she had ever assumed she would be able to do, and an ardent—well, steady and persistent—and highly eligible suitor in William Hagen. And the ache to experience the greater world wasn't even as pronounced now that she had experienced it. She, of course, wanted to experience it again, but now it had definition and was no longer the frustration it once had been. And the visit to the "greater world" had also encouraged her to take up a talent that had been discovered in her but had been disparaged and hindered by her strict minister father. Ada was a born artist, and all of the wonders she had seen in St. Louis had prompted her to take up her paints and canvasses again. It didn't matter that her subject matter was the relatively mundane landscapes around Slater. The ornateness she had seen at the World's Fair had given Ada a good eye for the simple strength of the landscape around her and, more important, the ability to reveal that simplicity and strength in art.
But Ada's world was destined to challenge and surprise her and deny her any promise of stability. Just as she was beginning to adjust to this world and a future with William Hagen, her world had collapsed inside her.
She let out a little, involuntary sob as the last of the children filed out of the schoolhouse. She busied herself briefly inside, setting up for the lessons of the next day, and then, with a sigh of resignation, a sigh that had a little catch of a sob in it, she closed the schoolhouse door and walked down the path to the street, easel and paints in hand, bound for an escape into the world of her art.
"Howdy, Miss Ada," Horace the postman sang out as he came up the road on his bicycle.
"Howdy back at you, Mr. Trap," Ada called to him.
He tipped his hat. "Mighty fine day, Miss. Ada, but it will turn cold soon enough. You off to Hagen's to be the first to snag one of those newfangled electric heaters that man from the fair over in St. Louis is pushing?"
That man from the fair? Ada stopped dead in her tracks. Her heart was racing. "What man, Mr. Trap? What heaters?"
"Don't you know? That fancy sales guy is back from the fair with all those new things they were introducing over there. He's at Hagen's now, settin' them up. Seems we're real privileged that he and Bill Hagen are close friends. We're about the first to get to buy those things that big Vaughn's Department Store in Chicago is merchandising from the fair."
Ada couldn't run fast enough. Luckily Mr. Trap had kept on down the road away from her on his bicycle or he would have been shocked to see her just drop her books, paints, and easel she was holding in her arms, tear her bonnet off, and run toward town, toward Hagen's Emporium, toward Charles.
