road rose slightly again, and after that there was a set of steep dips and rises through Walker’s Woods, followed by another flat stretch down Front Street (and right past the office of the newspaper). By this late in the year, the road had frosted and was pretty hard, though not icy. She congratulated herself on her good sense.
Pedaling straight forward was a new experience for her, and she understood at once how Dora had gotten all the way around the famous Forest Park in an afternoon. Covering distance in this solitary manner was marvelously intoxicating. The brown fields and the blue sky were all around; they seemed to dissipate crisply and evenly into all the distances—forward, backward, upward. The fields were darkly defined by the denuded brown trunks of hickories, black walnuts, and oaks. In Mr. Jones’s pasture, across the fence from John Gentry’s hay field, five or six white hogs were grunting and rooting for acorns; the noises they made had the clarity of gongs ringing in the air. And then she went down. She gripped the handlebars and felt the cold wind lift her hair and, it seemed, her cheeks and eyebrows. The brim of her hat folded back, and the hat itself threatened to fly off her head, but though she gave this a passing thought, she didn’t, could not, stop. The wheels made a brushing, clicking noise in the dirt of the road, and she knew instinctively to keep going no matter how much such going now shocked her. Tears poured down her cheeks, and then she was halfway up the next slope—inertia—she knew what it was called. But she slowed again, and then she was stopped and the bicycle tilting to the side. Truly, riding a bicycle was living life at a much faster pace, and very stimulating. She dismounted and pushed the bicycle up the remaining expanse of the slope. She was now two farms away from Gentry Farm. She had forgotten this part of it—that she would be a solitary traveler for the first time in her life. She remounted the bicycle and pedaled for the next few furlongs, possibly as much as a mile. Everything about the effort was more difficult than she had expected, and fairly soon she was breathing hard. She rarely if ever had done that before in her whole life, given her lazy nature and her mother’s views about proper female employments. She knew, of course, that she could turn the bicycle around and go back to the farm, but she also knew that she was more than halfway to town. The long slopes behind her seemed to grow longer, steeper, and more arduous with this thought, and then she was to the series of dips into Walker’s Woods.
The pleasure of these dips, which she had happily foreseen, was that from this direction, south, they gradually diminished toward town. There were three of them. She pedaled hard into the first, and over the edge. She lifted her feet out to either side, and down she went, holding tight to the handlebars. She aimed, with some nervousness, for the bridge at the bottom of the hill and then was across it. After the bridge, the trees thickened and the light grew dimmer. Her momentum carried her fast up the first bit of the next hill, and she managed to resume pedaling more quickly than she had, and so pedaled to the top, back into the sunlight. The drop of the second dip was immediate; down she went. This time, she started pedaling as soon as she got to the lowest point of the road, and once again managed to get up the entire hill before exhausting herself. Fortunately, the third dip was quite long and shallow—pleasantly relaxing. Though her cheeks burned in the cold, she was warm with the exertion. Though her arms trembled with the effort, her legs felt strong. The seat of the bicycle was springy and comfortable. She had heard of bicycle clubs traveling vast distances—the Columbia cyclists had traveled to Kansas City and to St. Louis in a contest of some sort. She came over the rise at the top of the third hill, and the town lay before her, bright in the winter sunshine. She sat up straighter and began pedaling in what she considered to be her most dignified manner. And just then her skirt caught in the back wheel and brought her to a halt. She put her foot down as