she could not bear to leave, even when the weather was hot and the crowds were pressing and the roads (miles and miles of them) dusty. Mrs. Bell had a proprietary pride in the fair, and would hear nothing but praise for the beautiful trains in the Palace of Transportation, the astounding electrical display in the Palace of Electricity and Machinery, the thrilling pipe organ in the Festival Hall, or, for that matter, the contortionist outside of Mysterious Asia. The world was jumbled together, with the Irish Village right beside the Tyrolean Alps, but they got used to that. After three days, they went, dazzled and bewildered, back to stay with Elizabeth in Kirkwood, and then returned home, only to go back to the exposition in July, when it was much hotter but there was even more to look at. It was then that they met Captain Early, who was staying in St. Louis with his mother and Mrs. Hitchens, and “doing the whole thing.”
The first day, they ate ice cream in the Tyrolean Alps; the day after that, they looked at the sculptures in the Colonnade; the day after that, they watched an athletic contest. Captain Early was in his element, and seemed eager to squire her about and show her every mechanical miracle on display. The contortionist and the pipe organ were not nearly so much to his taste as the Moving Picture in Hardware, or the ladies making corsets by machine, or even the enormous teapot. He was mildly diverted by the display in which criminals were measured, part by part, in order to demonstrate their criminal tendencies, and, indeed, he did take her to the Human Zoo, where all the races of man were shown off (and Geronimo was there, too). He was more animated than Margaret had ever seen him. He took her arm and hurried her here and there, but also was attentive to all of her possible desires—would she care for more ice cream, or for a sausage wrapped in a bun, or for some cherries? He seemed as unaffected by the heat as he had been unaffected by the cold on that strange winter day of their first meeting. Margaret saw now that he was not exactly like other mortals—he knew more, saw more. His mind worked more quickly and surveyed a broader landscape. Others stared at the three-thousand-horsepower steam turbine and the two-hundred-kilowatt alternator nearby, even removed their hats in awe, but Captain Early laughed aloud with delight at the two machines. He seemed positively joyful as dusk fell. He took Margaret’s elbow, halting her on the path, and then he gestured with his arm, and electrical lights lit up all around the park, as if he himself were sparking them. Margaret gasped.
That was what won her in the end. Captain Early knew all about electricity, and it seemed to her, as he spread his arms and raised his hat off his head only to put it back on and laugh, that he was presenting her with a hidden and powerful force, asking her to observe and embrace it, while everyone else seemed capable only of gawking. And she did think, just then, that if it was meant for a man and a woman to share something with each other that they did not share with anyone else, then, somehow, for Captain Early and herself, this was it, the strange effervescence of the impending twentieth century, of bright light beginning in one place and instantly being in another place in a way that you did not sense with a candle or even a star.
As she felt this, they walked on. He was careful to anchor her hand on the sleeve of his jacket, and to pat it from time to time. But, as she told Lavinia that evening when Lavinia pressed her, he actually said nothing that was, as Lavinia put it, “to the point.” Lavinia made her disappointment clear, but then she said, “Since there’s always something to be made the best of, we will make the best of it.”
In October, he returned again, but he did not make a proposal. As it turned out, he was finished in Washington, D.C. Lavinia said, impatiently, “If a woman’s task is not to be patient, then I cannot for the life of me understand what her task is!” Margaret was patient. Mrs. Early stayed away. Christmas passed. Captain Early was understood to be in Flagstaff. Then he was understood to have gone